Dancers
by menme
Summary: What she was doing to his life was disastrous. Like a train wreck. And that train had needed wrecking. A HouseOFC romance, rating is for sexual, not violence, some language
1. The Study of Clouds

**Dancers**

Chapter 1 (The Study of Clouds)

_G._

…and it was up and out, ignore the pain, every day hemorrhaging into the next, soon there'd be no blood left in it at all. He had cases, variously interesting and numbing, and then he didn't have cases, the ducklings following him around anyway like - well, like ducklings, quacking about his ethics one day, his non-existent bedside manner the next. It was all gray at the edges, so add flat affect to his mental whiteboard of himself, his body running around doing things without any thought or control behind it, that was ataxia. Write that down. He was collecting quite a list.

And every two or three days that little _ray_ of sunshine (he was beginning to time it right, she came out her apartment door next to his around 8:12), twenty-something, emphasis on the something, and hot - cute curling brown hair to her shoulders, no chest to speak of, but god that ass. If he timed it so he was waiting to ride the elevator down, he often got a _Morning!_, sweet sunshine smile, and he could watch that fabulous ass (eschewing the elevator, and why shouldn't she?) until it rounded the corner out of view down the next flight of stairs. Made his day every time.

And depressed the hell out of him. Because watching that sweet little bottom disappear all he could ever think was, You're never getting anything like that in this life unless you pay for it.

-----------------------

Depressed the hell out of him. Even arguing with Cuddy he couldn't stop thinking about _her_. The thought being: why should his days have come to depend so much on whether he spent two seconds in the morning with someone he didn't know? It just meant his life sucked, worse than he'd been admitting to himself.

"House, are you even listening? Do that to the patient and they will put you in jail, trust me. And this time I'll let you rot there. In fact, I'll enjoy it." Cuddy's face superimposed over his daydream of gorgeous Miss X made his leg hurt. Cud had more up front, but he was never going to get a _Morning!_ like that from his boss, and wouldn't have wanted to, for chrissake was that ever a disgusting thought! What case was she even talking about? He was losing it fast.

"Come to think of it, I might just bring a bottle of champagne to the prison so I can open it and celebrate while I watch you through the bars."

"Promise to wear the red blouse for me when you do. You know, the low-cut one." He leaned in confidentially. "I'll want to get something out of it too."

Actually Miss X had a name. He'd seen her down at the end of the mailboxes, and assuming she wasn't Harvey Kowalski her name was Danielle Sieger. Did her friends call her Dani?

Stop it, you fool.

"Jail, House!"

"Uuuh - Rock. Elvis? Sorry, I thought we were doing word association."

"You aren't listening, are you?"

"And you ain't nothing but a hound dog."

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Then came the day. Instead of hurrying down the stairs, she was waiting beside him at the elevator and then she was riding down beside him and he couldn't think of one single thing to say. Maybe something about going down together? More than anything in the world except maybe his leg, he hated being left speechless. If a _Morning!_ could make his day, a conversation would probably hold him for a week. He tried to keep his eyes front. If he looked at her he might whine like a puppy. No chest at all, really. Pre-_pre_pubescent.

"Say, aren't you the one always bounding up and down the stairs? What are you doing taking the elevator?" (Out of nowhere, that one. _Very_ dumb. He could have kicked himself. Well, actually he couldn't have).

"I hurt my ankle at work yesterday."

"And...what is it you do?"

"I'm a professional dancer."

Then he did turn to her, let his gaze journey up and down her, tell me where, I'll be front and center this evening. Was that a blush? No, she was looking straight at him. "Not the euphemistic kind. The real kind. You know, modern interpretive, that sort of thing. I'm with a dance theater in the city." The elevator landed with a thud.

Verbal diarrhea caught up with him. "Damn, not a stripper after all. I was about to say, you ought to check the warranty on that boob job." (You total idiot.)

Those amazing eyes went very, very cold. She reached the front door ahead of him and turned with a smile. "You have a nice day too." And let the door slam to in his face.

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Cuddy made good on her promise. All except the champagne. They took his Vicodin away. Jailors - didn't know pity from Adam, though he tried to explain it to them when the shakes started. But he was already too far gone by then to be coherent, or to be coherent enough to impress it upon the idiots that he was _dying_, goddammit, that it was a form of torture, little explosions behind his eyes, the bars of his cage moirèing (for that was what it was, a cage for that strange animal they couldn't accept, the one that frightened them so for being true to its nature - was sophomoric philosophizing a symptom of the withdrawal?), loud talk from his three cellmates like a hammer to the head, his leg grown ten times its size as the day became a night, a yawning black hole of pain he might fold himself into, vanishing down the rabbit-hole forever….

Cameron coming in around two. The moth drawn to his vulnerability. He didn't hear a word she said. Left her and slid down the hole….

At six a.m. Cuddy relented and posted bail. Or someone - probably Wilson, the god of friendship bless him - had talked her into relenting. The bottle, still there in the things they returned to him. Five minutes for the first one to kick in. Christ, it was better than sex. And with all the paperwork, it was eight before he stood in front of his own door, fumbling for the key.

"Just getting off work?"

He looked like shit on a stick, had to after a night like that. Couldn't she have overslept just once? "Actually I spent the night in jail." Ah, he had managed to shock her. Always good.

Her eyes large, searching. "Is there…anything I can do?"

"You can let me get inside here and go to bed."

"I mean, my brother-in-law's this high-powered lawyer."

"The hospital has high-powered lawyers."

"What…did you do?"

She was looking straight at him again. Unflinching.

"I disobeyed a court order to kill someone."

"You mean, pull the plug? They put you in jail for that?"

"Actually the relatives wanted to go with kidnapping charges too. Would have made it worse, I suppose." Her eyes grew even larger. "I - uh - wheeled this coma patient, machines and all, to a disused part of the hospital while no one was looking, and refused to tell them where. Cool, huh? I was hoping to gain an hour or so because I knew I could have cured him once the test came back." Unflinching. "Except they found him too fast."

"Then they…?"

"Oh, he's dead now. Disconnected, disengaged, taken offline. Pick your metaphor. I'm - uh - really tired." He gestured at his door.

She turned to the elevator and he couldn't help himself. "That ankle still hurt? It was three days ago."

"It's still swollen."

"Shouldn't be. Knock on my door when you get back. Um, not unless it's been at least six hours." And mumbling: "I need my beauty sleep."

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_D._

She'd done it before, but never with a man so patently unsuited to her. She looked down at his hair, curly brown, the same color as hers, and she wanted to touch it.

When obsession crept up on her, she had always managed to find release before, throwing herself into the dancing, flying through performances to keep herself from thinking, or just sleeping with the guy. Three times in the past year, she had gone to bed with a man and woken up with a boy. It was always fast and sweet and ultimately, saddeningly, boring.

This was different. It had crept up so slowly she could no longer say when it had started. Seeing him there at the elevator for the hundredth time (she had learned to wait for the sound of his door opening before slipping out her own), standing straight and yet crooked in some way that had nothing to do with the cane. The tiny smile whenever she said hello, quickly reined back in as though smiling were a tic he wanted no one to see.

The eyes, hard as blue ice, melting to vulnerability at the edges.

"The bruising actually got worse the second day." She sat on his sofa, her foot on his coffee table. He sat on the floor between the two and felt her ankle. Again, she imagined her hand reaching out to stroke his hair. "It moved down into my foot. Is that bad?" His touch, so matter-of-fact, left her warm. And it hurt. She suspected he was being rougher than he had to.

"Means you're going to die. Oh, don't look like that! I'm joking. It's a highly prevalent condition called gravity. The blood from the bruising seeking the path of least resistance. All it means is you've been on it more than you should have. Don't they teach you dancers how to handle sprains?"

"We're opening something new soon. I can't miss rehearsals."

He shrugged. "No limit to stupidity."

"Ow, why did you pinch me?"

"No numbness in the toes? Actually I wanted to make sure you hadn't gone to sleep. Most people at least groan a little at this point. Isn't my palpating this hurting you?"

_Time to go out on a limb_. "I'm pretending it doesn't to impress you."

For a moment his face was averted from her. "Ah, the many who have floundered on that rocky shore." He stood and she could see how much of a struggle the leg made it. "Should have moaned and groaned. It would have got me hotter." She glanced up quickly but he was gazing down at her ankle again. "Compress it at night, not too tight. Cool if you've overworked it. But the best thing would be, Stay _off_ it. Of course, you won't take my advice."

"If I did, who would carry me back to my apartment?"

He looked at her then. Really seeing her, she told herself. The light in the eyes had changed, from hard to…knowing. Looking at her too long. She willed herself not to blush. "I can lend you a cane." The moment was gone. "Considering you - what - danced on it for days I suspect you can make it back to your apartment without me." _What if I don't want to without you?_

At the door, last chance, she managed to match his sarcasm. "Thanks, doc. I'm low on cash, but I'll bake you some cookies some time."

"Right."

Back in her apartment she watched the rain run down the window. It was all about that personality, some exudation, like a storm, little flashes of lightning, all washing over her whenever she was near him, a deep drumming rhythm of the rain inside him. She wondered what he was crying about in there. Not a good obsession if she was drawn by his weakness. Yet it wasn't that.

The abrasiveness hadn't bothered her from the start. It attracted her when it shouldn't have. Just as quantum particles had opposites that didn't exist in the real world, his rudeness - in the wacky universe inside her head - became a charisma, a kind of non-charm neither repellant nor attractive but diametrical to both. She knew he was throwing up walls, hiding something inside, and she loved the sheer amount of effort he put into it. The ruder he got the more endearing it seemed. If that made her odd, so be it.

She knew she should start hardening herself. He was gay, or he had a girlfriend, someone elegant and older than her, who power-dressed (okay, maybe not, or she would dress _him_ better). He had as much as told her he wasn't interested. Stay _off_ it.

She hugged herself and watched the rain.

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_G._

Another case, obese woman, forty-three, some kind of symptoms, but he couldn't concentrate even though he'd just written them down. His notes on the whiteboard actually wobbled, his shot brain presenting as a first-grader's handwriting, and he knew they noticed.

"Differential diagnosis, people."

Chase looked disgusted. "The woman has one symptom. No feeling in the extremities. We can't -"

"Heavy metal poisoning," Cameron tossed in.

"You know, Cuddy told you she was going to do that." Foreman couldn't drop it, like a diamond-bit drill boring into his head, a twenty-carat headache, anything to do with jail really gets to the guy with the record. "In my opinion, you deserved a night in jail."

"Look, it's a little game Cuddy and I play, okay? If you want in on it - No, wait, it's a grown-ups' game."

"So it's a game. You're never going to beat her. She's too good at defense. I can't wait for her next move, to tell you the truth. She knows how to operate on you. You're in a battle of wills with her. It's eat or be eaten."

"And either one is fine with me." It picked him up a little to hear Cameron's moan. "Arsenic."

"What?"

"Hubby's putting rat poison in the patient's Jenny Craig shakes."

General snorts of disbelief. If he had a buck for every time. Chase was shaking his head. "You always do think the best of people, don't you?"

"Have you seen the patient, Dr. Chase?"

"I have, but I didn't think you had."

"Couldn't have missed her, could I? She's - what? - three hundred pounds?"

Cameron bit her lip. "And that naturally means her husband's trying to kill her."

"No, it naturally means she's very fat. Just do the test."

They left.

He picked up his cane. "Just you and me, doll," he told it and turned on the TV. General Hospital. Just his drug. Lithe young bodies pretending to heal the world while they screwed each other with their eyes across an operating table. One of them looked like Dani.

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That night she threw a party. _Party_ being mild; try riot. Earthquake. He sat alone in his apartment and watched the walls bulge. Cranked the TV up to wuthering heights, tickled the ivories, just trying to join in the fun of hearing loss here, people, but no message was getting across that sound barrier. A tentacle of noise extruded into the hall, her door opening, probably another guest arriving - that would be about the fiftieth. They had to be standing in the bathtub by now.

And then the knock on his door.

She was flushed, and concealing something behind her back. Face like a pink light. It made the hall brighter. Eyes fiery (and he could tell himself it was all for him, couldn't he, like he'd convinced himself she'd been coming on to him with that ankle thing - but who was he fooling?)

"I just wanted to let you know I'm celebrating my birthday."

"You don't have to apologize. I was planning to go deaf someday. Might as well be now."

"I was going to ask if you'd…like to join us."

A tentacle of the guests themselves, two men and a woman, wrapped itself around her doorjamb, probably wondering where the life of the party had got to. The woman's gaze strafed him. She had obviously been self-medicating. "Some guy with a cane," the woman tossed back into the apartment. The tentacle withdrew.

He saw that she had heard it too. "No, thanks," he told her. "I have to stay home and polish my cane."

"I thought you'd say that. Well, not exactly that. So -" She produced from behind her back a full champagne flute. "Give the glass back sometime. It's the only one that's not chipped."

"I'm honored."

She turned to go and damn if it wasn't as if someone had dimmed the lights. "Have a good one," he told her. "Really."

"Thanks."

Canes can come in handy, he wanted to tell her. Why, just today. He couldn't get _that_ out of his mind either, while he sat for the next two hours and listened to the party ebb until it was only an odd occasional banging against the nearest wall. Another bang and he was back in the clinic that afternoon, the black woman with her daughter, eleven maybe. Well-dressed, both of them. Bad teeth.

"She doesn't have all her immunizations."

"We get these. She will go to school here."

"Exactly why is it you want this certification to keep her out of P.E.?" Instinct was firing warning flares, but he could be wrong. It was the accent. Some kind of pidgin.

"She is very thin. Thin bones. We think it is not healthy."

"We being - you and your husband?"

"My husband is working for the United Nations."

"How long have you been in the States?"

"Three month."

"From -"

"Sierra Leone."

No more warning flares. That was an explosion. _Stay casual_. "Onset of menses?" Blank looks. _Work on the kid_. "Have you had a period, honey?" A nod. Leaning in now. Tensed. _Watch their faces_. "Is that when Mommy tied you down and cut your pee-pee?"

Mommy could move fast when she needed to. They might have made it out the door if he hadn't slammed it with his cane. The mother started shouting at the same time he did, but he was louder.

"You didn't want her in P.E. because she'd have had to undress in front of the others!"

"It is not your business!"

"Female circumcision is abuse!"

"It was made before we come here. It did not happen on your shore, so it is not a crime!"

"But I bet she's got a little sister." He spun on the girl. She clung to her mother, her eyes wide as night, oh yes we love our parents no matter what they do to us. "You want your sister to go through the same thing you did? You were lucky. You didn't die of sepsis. Sis may not be that lucky when her big day comes." He managed to get to the phone. "Get security in here." Cuddy was going to love this. "And Dr. Cuddy, for insecurity."

That was when the woman attacked him.

_Bang_, went the apartment wall next to him. Muted voices. He could have gotten creative with his cane on the mother, but there had stood her little girl, watching mommy claw the bad man, sobbing in her little-girl voice that it hadn't hurt at all, she'd gotten a lot of new clothes. Once security peeled his attacker off him and led her away, Cuddy asked him to examine the girl and they had had to hold _her_ down while she screamed for her mother as if it were the doctors who were her torturers. Full clidoridectomy, all of the clitoris gone and some of the labia. He'd thought he was going to be sick. He could cut open dead babies without blinking an eye…but this, jesus. The wound had healed improperly, probably from bad sutures made when the clitoral artery hemorrhaged, causing the skin to fuse and narrowing the opening. Kid would never have sex without pain. When his shaking got too bad, he left the rest to Cuddy, who stared at him in disbelief as he hobbled out, found an empty lounge where he hung over a waste basket, barely stopping himself from yelling new york into it, until the nausea passed. What was it about that kind of mutilation that got to him? Go off and cut away any chance a person had to ever feel sexual pleasure. Like excising the soul.

Bang. And boy was he stupid not to have recognized those sounds. Meant she was down to her last guest, that was all. The lucky guy, probably with dancer's thighs and an ass of steel, who got to stay and screw her. He'd leave, take the bike for a midnight spin, before he would sit there and listen to that. Yet the banging was too irregular - didn't dancers have rhythm? - the voices angry. _And getting angrier_. Christ he was even stupider than he'd thought, that was a scream now and why did violence have to sound like sex -

- he was up and down the hall before he could think, cane's a handy thing for pounding on doors, yell a little - if he was louder than the shit who was beating her up it might scare him enough to make him open the door -

The door flew open. Big and blond, linebacker arms. Fists clenched. "Who are you?"

"Some guy with a cane. I've called the police." He waved the cordless phone in his hand, forcing himself not to stare at it in surprise. He didn't remember having picked it up.

"The hell you have." Yet the guy's eyes narrowed. Ruminating on whether he could afford another footnote to his rapsheet.

"Wanna take that risk, big guy?"

As the door slammed he managed to get the cane and his bum leg in. The pain knocked the breath out of him, but one more squeeze and he was inside. As if called for by some complicated dance they switched places (no, more like animals circling), Mr. Date-Rape suddenly on the outside looking in, jacket flung over his arm. He gave the phone one more glance, sneered a "Screw you, grandpa," and fled.

She was leaning against the bedroom door, her face averted, peach robe half off one shoulder. She pulled it up. The silence grew until it was ludicrous. She wasn't turning for a reason. If the bastard had hit her in the face, he would chase after him, even if the guy had already made it down to the street, and then he would - what ?

"Turn around and look at me."

"I'm grateful to you, but I can take care of myself."

"I truly believe you can. But you didn't."

She turned then. No visible marks. Not even tears. "I guess I was sending him the wrong signals."

"The blame is yours to take. Always the woman's fault, in my experience." _Rein it in, damn it_. "If he punched you in the stomach, you could have a bruised liver."

"It wasn't like that. He wasn't going there. He…threw me up against the wall a few times. I'll have one major headache."

"You have to get on a stage and dance with this guy tomorrow?"

"He's not a colleague. Just a friend of a friend. Okay, as of now, an enemy of an enemy." Something in her eyes, even from across the room, told him he might never get past this new wall. Shame was a strong deterrent. "Did you really call the police?" She looked at the phone in his hand. "Maybe you should uncall them."

"Uh, no. Did forget to bring your glass back, though." More silence. He turned to leave.

"What were you going to do? Beat him up with your cane?"

Though he pretended otherwise to most people, he rarely experienced true mockery. He couldn't have been more shocked if she had attacked him like the African woman. She was actually biting her lip. Presumably choking back a good laugh.

"Yeah," he told her. "I'm not too bad at it. I've had a lot pf practice on my boss. A couple of patients." _End this_. "See you around."

He made it out the door.

Violence clogged his dreams. He chased a little black girl down the highway, the virus she harbored would kill everyone, yet when he held her struggling in his arms she was white and had curling brown hair. Let go, he screamed, she was too tiny to be that strong, wouldn't let him move, and the Mack truck hit them both. It smeared him between steel and the concrete barrier and he didn't feel a thing. He thought, this is what's it's like to be a blood clot. It was infarction from the inside. Nothing could get through.

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_D._

He had looked so wild and beautiful shoving his way in, brandishing nothing but a phone and a wooden stick, that some deeper wall she had never been aware of inside her had broken down, leaving her wide open. He was in all the way now. Matt could have crushed him like a bug and she had feared for a second he might, but the lie about the police had been the right one. And if she had only said, Thank you, and left it at that. But the OCD she'd developed around him lately had to kick in. The What's-going-on-in-your-head obsession that never left her day and night anymore had made her blurt out the last question, and it had offended him to the core. She'd never dreamed he could be sensitive that way. She'd _needed_ to know the answer: if he had thought through what would happen when the door opened, whether he just had a hero complex or whether it was…something more. His face when she voiced the question had stunned her, blue eyes wide, saying she'd gone too far, then curling in on themselves, all of him drawing back as neatly as the mimosa leaves she had caressed as a child. Protecting himself. Alone after he left, she had felt sick, limp as though the air had been sucked from the room, and she had leaned her body against the wall that connected her place to his (a thing she could never tell anyone, obsession gone so strange it frightened even her), palms pressed to the surface, imagining his skin.

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"I'm not a big cookie-baker, but - you've been a lot of help lately and I wanted to thank you."

They stood on the sidewalk in front of their building. He was coming, she was going. For three days she had tried to catch him. She felt like a fool.

He stared at the unsealed envelope a second before taking it. "A…thank-you note?"

"No. That's two tickets to our opening performance tomorrow night."

"Hm, modern dance. I'm not going to like it, am I?"

"I hope you'll come."

"And this piece of paper is…"

"A backstage pass. So you can come see me during the break. Prove you were there."

"It's a handwritten note." He read aloud in disbelief. "'_Let this guy in. Dani_.'"

"Our doorman's one of the dancer's great-uncles. We're not Robbie Williams."

"Too bad. If you were, this might be worth something. Or Townshend. Now that I would have appreciated."

"'Who?'"

He winked. "Very good."

And she held that until the next night, held it close like a charm, the wink, the smile so fleeting that someone not enraptured by his face might have missed it. Not knowing whether he was watching, whether he had come alone, she flew through the first half, understanding Georg's anarchic choreography for the first time (she was a bird). During the break backstage she rubbed her ankles, stretched, anything to keep her eyes from searching for him, but they found him anyway, the shape of him in the wings registering out of the corner of her sight before she could take it in, making her heart rush. He had already seen her. He stood like the still center of a storm amid the bustle of dancers and crew.

"Hey."

"I'm glad you came."

"Proves I'm here." He watched the others. "Bet they think I'm some famous dancer whose career was tragically cut short by a leg injury."

"Actually that's what I told the door guy. And he's very talkative." Another tiny smile. "How do you like it so far?"

"You…don't want to know." She waited. "Okay. If someone had told me a week ago I'd be seeing so many flailing limbs, I'd have assumed a psychotic episode in the ICU."

"It's expressionist."

"Definition being: do whatever you feel, with no discernible pattern."

"Not discernible to you, I guess. Come on, it's not that bad, is it?"

He stopped studying the others and looked straight at her. Too long. The knowing look again, yet mixed with …hesitation. "You look great up there."

The voice was so different it might have been another person. Devoid of sarcasm. With a jolt she realized she was hearing his real voice for the first time.

"Dani, _five._" Cyndi brushed by her. She remembered where she was. "Your hair." A lock of her hair had freed itself from the tight bun Georg insisted on. She fumbled with it. "I've - got to go," she told him. He was already turning to leave. "Guess this means you're not staying for the second half?"

"Oh, I'm staying."

An erratic second half, in which the stage had grown soft and Georg tightened steps unexpectedly, his face near hers frowning at her loss of focus; _I am focused_, she wanted to whisper to him, _on a voice_.

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She left the party early. Enough of people asking who the guy with the cane had been, enough of answering, Just a neighbor. Of keeping her voice casual. In her apartment she stood still, listening. If he would only play his piano, even one note, make any sound at all, she would know he was awake, but it suddenly didn't matter. She was shaking. She had stepped outside the world, it seemed, the one in which she was adventurous, afraid of nothing, the dancer who saw what she wanted and took it. She was on unknown terrain and the next step was off a cliff. She was balanced on air. He might not catch her at all.

Then she was at his door, ringing the bell.

It took forever (which meant he had been asleep). A thump against the door (meant he was looking at her through the spyhole). Rattle of the chain.

He stood clutching his cane, open pyjama shirt, all too quick to take in. Eyes sleepy-concerned, almost alarmed. "What is it?" he asked.

_(he would laugh he was gay he had a woman there already) _

"Do you want to sleep with me?"

Time stopped.

His mouth opened then closed. A hundred expressions crossed his face. "Yes," he said at last, in his real voice.

He held the door open and she walked in, heart beating wildly, her back to him.

"I've never done this before," she said. She heard him relocking the chain.

"Sleep with someone?"

"Knock on someone's door at midnight like this -" When she turned he was close, startling her, his brusque hand lifting her chin to make her look at him.

"And you're doing it now because you're drunk."

He saw his mistake in the same instant, his eyes going wide, and they both murmured No together. "At least not on booze," she whispered. _Now._

His hand left her chin to touch her face, a thumb across her lips, eyelids: a blind man taking the measure of a sculpture though his gaze never left her eyes, then he was kissing her. His beard was softer than she'd imagined. She felt like rain inside. His free arm pressed her to him, hard, lips tightening, tongue at hers. Her hands felt his chest, his hair, his hips. He was hard as a rock already, when had that happened, the shape of his cock precise through the loose pants. He drew back, let his cane drop to the floor, used both hands to slip her sweater over her head and fling it away. When he looked her up and down she saw how hungry he must have been for a long time, almost starving, and something twisted inside her. He brushed the back of his hand up her abdomen to her breasts, knuckles stroking one firm nipple as though afraid to open his palm to it.

"Pick up my cane," he said.

She stooped and handed it to him. He took her by the arm, an urgent crush, then realizing it was rough, by the hand, and led her into the bedroom.

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Her fingers slipping into his waistband, working it down over him.

"My leg."

"We won't hurt it, will we?"

"It's just…not a pretty sight."

"Oh." She covered his mouth with hers, grinning, and yanked his pants down. As they fell on the bed he was laughing or moaning, she couldn't tell and it didn't matter, the sounds moving between their mouths.

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Clothes all gone. He took his time. Fingertips, to trace her neck, her thighs, even her feet; she was a specimen. Let him. Hands, to cup her bottom, knead, rush up to her breasts. She matched his slow savoring: her face in his hair, lips across his chest and the veins on his biceps (all the time wanting him in her, only that, weren't women supposed to like long foreplay). His cock was not thick but long, so that it curved up to touch his stomach. She bent to tease the tip there with her tongue, from where it stuck to his skin with the first pearl of wetness, and slid it into her mouth. His small yell of pleasure shook her. So hungry. His hands moved in her hair, guiding her, then giving up to the rhythm of her mouth, caressing, tightening, finally pulling her face up to his. "Too fast," he gasped. "I don't want…" _You want_, she almost cried out loud. You want and want and never get. Take. He seemed not to breathe, every muscle hard and taut to bursting, his entire body like his cock, engorged with desire. Eyes still as wide as they had been when she spoke at the door, believing-unbelieving, a child at Christmas.

And then he was in her, beside himself. She cried out on top of him, with him, moving into his thrust. He flipped them both, she didn't know how he could with the leg (the leg she would not let herself look at because he didn't want her to). Every thrust was like an explosion in her head, her thighs. He rippled above her, twisted her, he was wrapping himself in her. Arms and legs so tangled she didn't know whose skin her lips brushed.

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Crucified from behind. Her body pinned against the headboard by the strength of his thrusts, palms spread to the wall. Little bites in the back of her neck he couldn't seem to let go of, almost gnawing. Animals did that. His hands bruised her shoulders and she forgave them. They were her hands. Every thrust was more violent, finding raw places inside her. His gasps grew quicker. She wanted to see his face. When he turned her from the wall and bent her forward, she twisted off him and he cried out. His eyes had changed color, dark blue seas, features chiseled clean with desire. She pulled him down on top of her, back inside of her, and at the last moment, an animal cry already in his throat, he took her hair in his hand and drew it over her eyes (the shock of it exploding inside her with her own orgasm), holding it there though she tried to snatch it back, a blindfold so she couldn't see his face when he came.

------------------------------------------

_G._

_Cherish this_.

It was the moment between sleep and waking when the pain hadn't yet rebooted. He'd timed it - subjective, sure - at three seconds. Leg floating free of him somewhere, non-existent. He knew it was only an effect of the delta waves still sloshing through his brain. Pain had to shut down for sleep and he had trained himself to come fully awake before it could come rushing back in. To cherish every one of those three beautiful-beyond-belief painless seconds.

Second one.

His tender groin - god, it felt positively _bruised_ - meant one thing: overkill the night before.

Second two.

Warm back pressed to his, leading down to what were decidedly buttocks - that would be the bruisee, so to speak, if he had gone at it with his usual fervor.

Ergo, the hooker hadn't left.

The pain flooding back - hello, second number three - was so intense it still shriveled him inside every morning, even after five years. And with it came memory.

No hooker.

He turned. She stirred, pulled the sheet back over a pretty shoulder. One brown eye opened, flecked with gold.

_Don't smile_. "You're still here."

Gold flecks evaporated. "Was I supposed to leave?"

Hadn't he told her last night he figured her for a dream? What other crazy stuff had he said? "I just thought you'd vanish when I _really_ woke up." He inched the sheet down. "You know, you're getting up with me." She inched it back up and they played a little tug-of-war. "You are the reason I'm going to have the day from hell because I didn't get any sleep. You're getting up with me."

She was laughing. "Didn't know you could be so mean."

"You don't know the half of it." He rose before he could do something idiotic like brush the strand of hair from her face. "I'm making coffee."

In the kitchen he leaned against the counter to catch his mental breath. Small strings of explosions kept going off in his head, moments from the night before, bright and dark and strange; if he couldn't catch them now, he wouldn't know how to look at her when she walked in.

She had lain with her head on his chest afterward. "Your heart's so fast."

"Yes, your chosen lover's an old geezer who's going to die of a heart attack on you."

"Maybe you should hear my heart."

Simply, clinically, he had placed two fingers at her neck. "One-ten." At her taken-back look, he put his lips there instead, fingered a breast, nipple the color of brandy, felt her hands in his hair.

"Before you even walked through the door," he said, stretching back out beside her, "I decided that this was just a very, _very_ vivid dream. So you're going to have to say something."

"What?"

"Anything to prove you're real. Something my own mind couldn't have come up with."

She smiled and laid her head back on the pillow. "Dreams don't work that way." (Didn't he know it?) "Anything I say you'd tell yourself your mind had invented." A tiny frown curled her brow. "There is something I need to ask you. It's a little embarrassing." He waited. "I - um - don't know your first name." At his astonished look: "You're just G. on your mailbox."

"It's Greg."

"Hi, Greg."

"You know, I think that did it. I wouldn't have dreamed you'd go to bed with someone without knowing his name."

"So you're awake. Does that make it better or worse?"

"Oh, it couldn't get any better." She kissed him. "Okay, maybe it could."

They didn't talk for awhile. When they came back to themselves, she was watching him.

"_Still_…having a problem with this," he told her. "You, here. Me." He ran a finger down her cheek, her neck, all the way to one slender hip, tried to get his voice under control. "You must have men coming and going."

"They come and then they go. Actually, I think I scare them away."

"This the part where you pull the Sharon Stone knife out?"

She was grinning. "After we've made love the first time, I tell them they have to quote me a poem."

Several comments involving hell freezing over occurred to him. "Do any of them ever do it?"

"Some have."

"Has anyone ever turned the tables on you and made you quote a poem?"

By her look he'd managed to surprise her. "Not till now. English or German?"

"_German_?"

Her father had been German. Had died when she was fifteen (some deepness to the voice there, love or pain or both). She'd spent a year in Munich studying dance.

"So what rhymes with 'Mein Fuehrer'?"

Lying back, eyes closed, she had quoted something long and swishy and that rhymed as far as he could tell, but he'd stopped her with his mouth before she could finish, his cock, to his amazement, having started to swell again as he watched her.

Later he had diagnosed her. She got one cold after another in winter, had irregular periods and morning leg cramps - it was his standard guesswork (she was overtrained and had no body fat to speak of), but her look told him he'd got at least two out of three. He took another stab in the dark. "And you've had an abortion."

"You can't tell something like that by looking."

"Ah, but that slow blink gives you away."

She'd gone very still. "And do I sink in your estimation?"

"Morally, no. Intellectually, a lot. You have to be pretty dumb nowadays to get pregnant without wanting to."

"I was twenty. Actually, it's as easy as jumping in bed with someone on impulse, isn't it?" _Ah_. He ceded her point with a questioning look. "I have an IUD."

Later she went looking for ice-cream and excavated some in his freezer. "This is how I celebrate," she told him, bringing the bowl into bed to share with him. He refrained from telling her the stuff was probably three years old. As she nested down beside him, the sheet slipped off his leg and he saw how her eyes danced away to somewhere else - anywhere else. _Please not that_. The throbbing started up behind his eyelids. With a flourish that came up too rough, he flung the sheet back. "If you want to look at the leg, do it."

She held his gaze. "I thought you didn't want me to."

"Do it."

While she bent and studied the scar as though memorizing for a test, he studied a corner of the ceiling. Don't look at her face. That awful helplessness he could taste in his throat - always back in the hospital; she might have been a surgeon planning some more maiming, a finger (hers so gentle) mapping the puckered flesh. When she asked, he explained what had happened, resecting the Stacy parts. When she said, "That means it hurts to walk on?" he swallowed the acid taste in his throat, worse than bile, and said, "It hurts all the time."

Her eyes grew wide. She laid her head back next to his on the pillow. "Isn't there something you can take?"

"There are any number of painkillers." Hookers up there high on the list, babe. "My poison of choice is called Vicodin. Daddy's little helper. I take just enough to hover under the threshold of addiction."

Her look was accepting. Not naive, rather a kind of after-sex trust in his honesty. Then you will have to be honest.

"That's not true," he admitted. "I'm addicted.

Now _that_ look, that was fear. Dawning realization of what kind of pit she was screwing around in. She hid it so fast it gained his respect.

"Yes," he said. "Your chosen lover has a lot of problems."

"My chosen lover's a beautiful lover."

Much later: "I just remembered a poem I can quote you after all."

"Tell me," she gasped.

"I'm concentrating on something else right now, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Now."

"Oh all right -

_She offered her honor,_

_He honored her offer._

_And so all night long_

_It was on her and off her._

See, told you it'd break my concentration."

There was a sound in the next room. He was holding something in his hand - a coffee filter. Through the kitchen door he could see her walk across the living room, her jeans back on, topless (that bringing him neatly out of his reverie) and he realized she was looking for the sweater he'd relieved her of the night before. She hadn't seen him. He watched her dress, still fumbling in his mind to put it all in some kind of order. Shouldn't have been. When she turned, he ducked back to the coffee machine. And no, it wasn't nerves. Just healthy morning-after caution.

"Morning." She leaned on the counter. Her hair was a mess.

"I'm impressed," he told her.

"That I got up?"

"That you put your own clothes on."

"I've - um - been doing that for a long time."

"Most women do that oh-so-cute morning-after thing where they put the guy's shirt on and run around in nothing else. Supposed to get him hot again or something. But no, you put your own clothes on. That's impressive."

"Glad you're so easy to impress. Plus you told me you had to go to work. Wouldn't want you getting hot again."

"Ah, if I'd said I was staying home, you'd be in my pyjama shirt."

"Probably not. It looked pretty grungy."

"Hey, it's a bachelor pad." And then it was verbal diarrhea time again - he was spouting some nonsense about dirt and messies and the genius within chaos because she stood so close, saying nothing, that tiny smile on those lips so knowing that he broke off in the middle of a sentence to whisper, "You're waiting for me to kiss you, aren't you?" and then they were and it was so easy, the hell with caution and reserve and let's see what happens.

When he was ten he'd once climbed the dare bridge over the lake they all swam in, all the way to the central arch, sixty feet above the water, while kids whooped below. Felt the wind limn the shape of his body, the blue and yellow sky spinning. No contact with the world except his toes and then he dove. He hadn't thought about that in years.

"I really do have to go to work."

"You started this."

"Who knocked on whose door at midnight?"

"So you see this as one long continuum."

He glanced down at himself growing hard. "That's…one word for it."

When they left it was late. As she was about to slip inside her own door in the hall he turned (_we weren't going to say this, were we_?): "See you tonight?"

"I'm dancing."

"Oh, right. Well, knock when you get in. You're good at that."

No reply but a smile and a closing door.

Dream or not, she was going to vanish. And probably soon. Life hadn't taught him all those lessons for nothing. The rationalist bastard inside him shrugged - so enjoy while you can - yet there was something else there. The wind limning his body as he pushed the bike to the limit, shooting up miniature death alleys between trucks. He was halfway to the hospital before he realized he hadn't had his little white breakfast at all.

--------------------------------------------

End of Chapter 1


	2. Possession

NOT a new chapter - my apologies to those on alert lists. I'm just integrating all the old chapters under one story heading...

**Dancers** - Chapter 2 (_Possession_)

_J._

What happens if I do _this_?

He had known House for years before the sentence occurred to him. Probed and pondered and barely understood the man he called his best friend. The sentence was his own way of imagining what went on in the guy's head, House's curiosity about how things worked in a world that for his guillotine mind must have been almost always suicidally boring. It was the other man's deepest philosophy, he told himself, not just on diagnostic medicine, but on people, their feelings, life.

What happens if I do _this_?

A kid - albeit a genius one - poking buttons on a nuclear bomb.

Which was why he knew something was wrong.

The change was subtle, but inclination and training, plus an observance of House that bordered on obsession, meant he couldn't miss the new hesitancy in the other doctor's every word and gesture. Caution was _his_ style, the polar opposite of House - non-explosive, every move thought-through, did he stand with his hands on his hips to give a patient terrible news or sit with hands palm-up in his lap - so he knew it when he saw it. As if overnight all that had been stage props for Greg House had become real things, breakable, the robot extras suddenly people. There was a startled solidity to his interface with them.

Someone coming out of a trance, surprised to touch the world and feel it pushing back.

Even now, the way he entered his friend's office, a piece of paper in his hand, some form, a quick look to check for visitors. He wasn't bursting in as he usually did. He was _approaching_.

"You got time? Dumb question. I need to talk at you about something."

Might as well plunge in. "Is this about your girlfriend?"

Opportunities to surprise House were rare; he sat back and savored the man's expression. It was short-lived. "Kudos." He sank into a chair, cane careless over the back. "Did you pull that rabbit out yourself?"

"Not alone. There's been speculation. Your fellows _are_ top-notch doctors. One is even a neurologist, in case you've forgotten. You think they'd fail to notice the kind of severe personality change you've gone through the last three weeks?" House's eyes had narrowed, reviewing. Could he have been so unaware of how his behavior betrayed him? "I was there myself on the CNS lymphoma case yesterday. You left the room and we all realized at the same time that the entire conversation had contained not one put-down."

"Don't insult me -"

"Not one. Foreman and Chase were unanimous in concluding that this symptom can mean only one thing: you're getting some."

"And Cameron?"

"Oh, in denial as usual. Told them to stop being such _men_." Actually it hurt a little to see - in House's sidelong look at him - that his fellows had been right. That the niceness meant that for three weeks he had had a relationship - in itself unheard of in the last few years - and hadn't said a word about it to him. He was only being called in now for a consult, he guessed, because there was a problem. He sat back. "So - are you going to tell me her name?"

There ensued a story so chock-full of unbelievable, from a midnight knock on the door to a wicked encounter with a piano bench - the general story-arc being a dauntless, endless three weeks of sex so hot even the never-at-a-loss doctor found it hard to put in words - that he could only assume it was contrived. Only the very un-Housian starts and stops, as though the teller himself could barely fathom it all, made him think there was some half-truth in there.

The guy had met _someone_.

Details (some surely hyperbole): a dancer, twenty-six. Lived in the apartment next door. That one sounded right. He struggled for the memory: some stunning young thing passing him in the hall on his last visit. The face wouldn't come (he supposed he had suppressed it entirely, that kind of wishful thinking being detrimental to his already-stage-four marriage). She was intelligent, easy-going, gorgeous (a hitch to the assured House voice there).

"She wears sensible shoes."

"Good."

"She knows who Art Tatum is."

He raised an eyebrow "Very good." If it were true, it meant a lot.

"So - how do I get away from her?"

"Beg pardon?"

He waved the form in his hand. "This is an endocrinology conference in Chicago. Tomorrow and Friday. I need a few days to clear my mind. Figure out whether this goes on. I can tell her it's been planned for months. So, do I go?"

As usual, the conversation was already so sailor-knot complicated he needed all his concentration to keep up. Ellipses were a House specialty. He must have missed something.

"Let me get this straight. You're vaginally intubating this hot babe every night and you have to get _away _from that."

"Things are just getting a little too…intense."

He tried to picture intense. Something in the face across from him, the man's studious fumbling with the pencil-holder on his desk, told him that whatever intensity was unnerving him had little to do with bodies on bodies. The things that went on under the surface - feelings any relationship harbored - were clawing at him and it scared him. "You know what?" he told him. "By all means, go to Chicago. Leave me her number when you do."

"It's jake with me. Julia does not loom large in your mind, I take it."

"To be honest, I think this girlfriend doesn't exist."

"_What?_"

"I think you're jerking my chain, for some unfathomable reason. She's just too perfect. Piano bench? That's a great one -"

"Give me some credit here."

"I'm giving you credit. Your gags are always good, well thought out. I'm just wondering where this one's headed. Is it when you say you're dumping her and I can have her, and when I show up there's no one there or it's a Kirstie Alley look-alike? Besides which, in your own words from several years back, any woman who would be with you would, per definition, have to be either Stacy or a fawning, imbecilic masochist."

"Did I really say imbecilic?"

"Ergo: she doesn't exist."

House looked at him for a long time. "To use a term you might understand: I'm as serious as cancer."

_Thought so_. He gazed out the window. The sun threw a blinding shimmer on the balcony, little celebrations of hard light. House was asking for his opinion. He ought to get up and close the blinds. Asking him for his help. "So, what you want to hear from me is not whether you should go to Chicago, but what you should do when you get back." He sighed. "I haven't even met the woman. I'm supposed to give you some prognosis on the future of the whole thing, or how serious about you she is, or - or what?" He turned back. "You realize that if it were this Dani asking me, I'd tell her to run like hell."

"I'm sure you would."

"Much more concerned about her emotional safety than yours." As lies went, it was a whopper. House didn't seem to notice. He was getting up to leave.

"You should go to Chicago." It was blurted out, sounding foolish, but the look it got him was almost grateful. "Instinct's telling you that you need space, you should do it. Come back afterwards and just…let things happen."

"The waiting principle." He shrugged. "Works for diagnostics." At the door he turned. That hesitancy. "Thanks."

Alone, he got up and closed the blinds. The _You're welcome_ that had hung on his lips for one small second would have been ludicrous. As if he'd done anything. Advice to House might as well have been written on spitwads and shot into a black hole. Yet he couldn't shake the sensation that this time the Great Ignorer had listened, that the world teetered on some edge and he may have given it a push.

……………………………………………………………………………………..

_G. (Greg)_

Intense, he had wanted to tell Wilson, was the wrong word.

What she was doing to him was a catastrophe. As the cliche went it was like watching a train wreck. A good one, too. That train had needed wrecking. And like the cliche it had all been in slow motion so far, so he could savor every moment of the life he'd set up to be so deliberately casual flying off the rails. It was a rush. His peace of mind? Watch it buckle. Concentration on his work? Crushed between two screeching freight cars. Ability to be alone without feeling lonely? A smoking ruin beside the tracks.

He wanted her every second of every day, a pulsing ache at the back of his head and groin that could care less what he was doing - researching a case, riding to work. Examining a clinic patient's armpit rash. Eating another hideous cafeteria lunch with Wilson, her scent would surround him at some point, her voice layered into the white noise, so that he started and had to stop himself from turning to look for her. Even now, in this smoky gonzo hole called the Twelve-Bar Blues (he'd had his reasons for picking Chicago), the horn man working up such a sweat even the low lights trickled off him in puddles, she now entered, sat down, placed a ghost hand on his chest. Hi, Greg.

The sex had come to mean more instead of less. No habituation. She was his new drug (the Vicodin still finding its way down his throat, though, more than ever after that first morning; he wasn't losing one minute of this slick train wreck to the pain). With her soft skin and melting eyes she was the hard stuff. It was as if all the sex he'd ever known, Stacy included, had only been a gateway drug to her. When he needed her, like now, she came (her body becoming the plucked strings of the bass up there, her cries against him the contrapuntal rhythm), and it couldn't matter less what he'd been doing or who he'd been talking to - he would feel her waist between his hands, the exact small width of it, as though the skin lay there against his palms, curving down to hips, around to that tensed-tight ass above dancer's thighs. His mouth following, once he found how much she liked it, down to her round dark bush, salty-sweet (bottle that perfume, make a fortune), pinning her open with his arms because it turned him inside out to feel her buck, tonguing until the last moment and then drawing back to watch her come, her breathy Ohs all out of sync with the pulse of her pink flesh there, five, six throbs, thick then slow, the rhythm as ancient as blood, then the seam of wetness, more viscous than what his tongue had laid down, his lips trailing it up along her breasts to her hair, her mouth. They drank each other that way, she with drawn-out sips of pleasure, he like a dying man in a desert. And when he opened his eyes, Cameron would be staring at him from across the table as if he were a lab result that made no sense, all three of them with their faces on their default setting of clueless, only Foreman, his gaze a level keener, leaning in to ask: "Where did you just go?"

"Intellectual heights you've never dreamt of."

The piano bench had been the catalyst. Intense. He'd left her lying in bed that last night to go make himself a drink and his other lover had beckoned, ivory keys a red gleam in the light from the bar across the street. When he sat to play, something old floated up. He didn't give a flip about classical, but he'd learned it all, it still came when he wanted it, and then she was sitting there beside him, their naked hips touching. "Did you know you could dance to Chopin?" she murmured. She stood and danced in the buff for him, rubbery moves (Asian?), muscles bunching when she went up on her toes (he didn't know if she was making it up as she went along, but weren't they both?), lost in herself until he came down on a wrong note, and then she came back to him, making him turn to her on the bench and guiding him into her with her hand.

He'd led Wilson to think it'd been kinkier than it was, that the intense lay in the kinky, but it had just been two people going at it straddling a bench. It was the stillness that had frightened him. The way time had …slowed. When he'd entered her a switch circuit had closed in his mind; it was as though she were inside _him_, stroking her way out, splitting him open while his right hand banged crazy chords as he sought support for his thrusts, a hiation that - when he came - made him spill all of himself into her until there was nothing left, his blood leaving him to circulate through her as though her body were a filter, before coming back into him cleaner.

Scary enough to push him onto a plane for Chicago.

"Fugue state," said a voice. Fat wieners waved in his face. Someone's fingers.

"Catatonia," said another. A face loomed near his, Sanders from Hopkins, the endocrinologist ugly as sin (the kind you don't confess), veins like worms on his nose because he'd started to drink more since they last met.

The lap dance he'd ordered was over. The strip joint was so smoky his eyes burned (where was the jazz club?). With a start like a bolo punch to his chest, he remembered it was the second night in Chicago. He must have at least checked in to the conference, hooked up with these two bozo doctors, but he had no memory of it nor of deciding to hang with them (had he become such a headcase?) and take in some strippers. Severe dissociative amnesia there. He did remember thinking that maybe the sight of really big boobs might make him forget her for a while (the thought lame enough to make him cringe now).

"At a hundred a pop you should have gotten more out of it." The fat one (name lost to boring) rolled his eyes at Sanders.

He stood and shrugged on his jacket. "I think I'm coming down with something," he told them. The stripper (and those hooters _should_ have been adequate to the task) was still watching him as she turned back to the stage, a shadow of a smile on her lips. Whatever she'd sensed, she knew it wasn't her doing.

The night air cooled him. Ugly was good - the backstreet slick with drizzle just starting, a fungal smell from the garbage cans. Brought him back to earth. It was beauty that was dangerous. Addictive. He didn't want to feel beauty - the moments when what she did to him made him forget there was such a thing as pain - because when it ended (and the _when_ was inevitable, he knew) the withdrawal would be so godawful that the few times he'd tried to kick the pills would seem like a day at the beach. He took another breath, the air cold for early fall, the rushing sounds of the crowd a blur in the bright fluorescent light, forget wars, airports were the true man-made hells, all pretentious luggage and families screaming hellos, but she'd come to meet him. When he didn't bend to her, she went up on tiptoe to kiss him. "How was Chicago?"

"Full of jazz."

"Yours too now, I bet."

"I'll let you believe that."

In her kitchen he caught the first frown. The casual hand drawn back from his arm when he didn't respond. She wasn't pushing the issue. He leaned on the counter fondling a drink. I'm waiting for time to stop, he wanted to tell her, so I can say this. He realized it wasn't going to.

"You know why I really went to this conference?"

She had gone very still beside him. "No."

"I wanted to get away from you."

It was a statement of fact. When he saw her face he realized what it sounded like, but she was already turning to a chair. In a voice he'd never heard from her before she said, "I guess I'll sit down for this one."

_Breathless_. He was as out of breath as he had been in his former life after running ten miles. He studied the kitchen; she had cleaned up (for him?), as messy - he had found - in her way as he was. The bright colors gleamed, the opposite of his own caveman decor. Could it be so hard to say? He said, "It didn't work."

She stared. "What does that mean?"

Sunny simple colors, no girlish floral patterns. Keep your eyes on the corner. "Means I didn't stop thinking about you for a second." His voice sounded like a teenager's. When he finally looked at her eyes, their wide defenseless waiting, he felt something give away inside. He shrugged. "Means you're more interesting than toxic goiters." He thought about it a moment as he sat down across from her. "Which isn't saying much."

The silence had turned easy. She studied him, smiling. "Look," he said. "I'm… prone to addiction. And - that's what this is starting to look like. I just thought you ought to know."

"I can be pretty obsessive myself." She was standing, coming around the table to him. "So. I think that's enough serious for one day. Let's go out and do something."

So easy. "What?"

"Anything. What did you do before me? And do not tell me you watched TV."

"Okay, I won't tell you. Let's see, staying with the general subject of addiction…"

They rode his bike into town and he showed her how to bet on the horses.

So easy.

…………………………………………………………………………………

_D._

She had never been any better at reading people than most women, but it was as if she saw his thoughts. As if she'd known him all her life - when he said and did certain things the dark scenery behind his rude - or gentle or incomprehensible - action leaped across to her like a spark and she understood him.

Jerk took on a new meaning. When he stopped in the middle of ordering to tell the waiter he was a moron and should cut back on the meth because it was killing him, he had an agenda. When he scowled so hard at a child staring at his cane that it made the kid cry, it was from a deep well of humiliation he had to pretend didn't exist or it would drown him. The world hurt him - had hurt him many times - without meaning to and he would change it by not accepting it the way it was.

He talked about his work - never shut up, in fact - things that had gotten bottled up, she understood, when there was no one to talk to, half of it so bizarre - leprosy and plague and measles in the brain - that she began to realize he just naturally went over the top a lot. She could accept that too. Everyone stretched the truth - no, everyone lies, she could hear him saying - but she wouldn't call him on it. She knew all the names, his succinct descriptions of them (_Aussie wuss, great hair_ being her favorite). They were all important to him, though she guessed they would never have suspected that. Wilson's my handler, he told her one night in bed. Adding: And I do mean that in the zoological sense. Wilson was the one she wanted to meet. Unless she came down with the world's rarest disease, he might never let her see where he worked, but she wanted to be a part of his life, however meager he made it out to be.

When he had a case (odd in itself, that he didn't have cases all the time, though she assumed he only allowed the complicated ones to occupy him) then he became a kind of machine intelligence, sitting staring at the piano keys for hours, sounding a note every few minutes, or pulling the bike over to the side of the highway with her on the back to make a note on whatever just occurred to him. She ceased to exist for him during those times, and she could live with that too. He was focused to the point of excluding all else then, and she noticed that whenever it happened he took less of the painkillers.

He got phone calls, the language as incomprehensible as her German would have been to him, mugas and mursa and RBCs. MDeity-speak, she told him, they were all playing doctor-gods. Coming back from a bar at two a.m. (he'd woken her up and said he had to go somewhere to think about a case and did she want to come, then had talked about Stacy instead, a subject he'd strung about twenty words together on since she'd known him, scary because it told her how deep the hurt went), she had found his answering machine flashing.

"You've had three messages in your absence, Dr. House."

"That so?" He had his arms around her, hands cupping her in the way that always turned her on. "Now if you were my secretary, you'd know I always ignore my messages."

"You ignored mine long enough, if I recall."

"That wasn't ignoring. I just couldn't believe I was going to get that lucky."

"For a while there, I thought you were gay."

"You didn't."

"I did."

"You really thought I was playing for the pink side?"

"There was a good chance."

"There was a _bad_ chance." He hit the button without looking. An Australian voice filled the room. "Chase," he told her.

"I think I could tell from the accent."

He skipped to the next. A woman. "Cameron."

"I think I could tell from the tail-wagging admiration in the voice." It was the first time she'd let him know how much she'd read into his few mentions of Cameron.

He gave her an almost embarrassed look. "We're going to have to do something about that telepathy of yours." He skipped to the next.

"Don't you need to hear what they say?" she asked, laughing.

"Oh, this is Foreman. He'll have the goods." The last voice spouted numbers without beating around the bush and he was punching in a phone number before it even finished. "No", he blurted into it, as if continuing a conversation interrupted seconds ago. "And which of you idiots thought that would work?" He was already picking up his helmet. She was lost to him. "I'll be there in twenty minutes. No, do _not_ do that, if any of you does they're fired -"

When she was alone, she rewound the tape to hear the voices again. He had called it telepathy, but it was more a heightened state of listening. A need to know everything about anything that mattered to him. The voices mattered, the minds behind them. There had been a catch in his sarcastic tone when he said their names, so far over at the edge of audible that anyone not attuned to him might have missed it. A surge of something like pride.

……………………………………………………………………………………

"Would you stop with the hair? That's the third time you've put it behind your ear. Do _not_ tell me you're nervous."

He'd tried to tell her dinner for four at the Wilsons' would be casual, but the building had had a doorman and the elevator was all gilt and glass, and it _was_ his best friend after all, the man who opened the door, though not at all what she'd expected. Not a snob, but not a rock-concert T-shirt guy in the Greg style, and opposites in personality, she saw instantly, the sheer politeness a little shocking, though Greg had warned her. She let him take her coat, told him she refused to call him Wilson like Greg did and got back a grateful "James." He was the kind of doctor you'd want, she supposed, if you were dying of cancer, whereas Greg, she'd long ago surmised, was the kind you'd want to die just to get away from. She could tell the guy was holding back some shock of his own (a reaction she knew from introducing Greg to her friends, the what-was-she-thinking bemusement, though in Wilson's case it must have been more a how-does-he-rate-her). He didn't seem to fit the place, with its anigre-wood paneling and a glass case of what looked like Lalique figurines, but when his wife Julia came out of the kitchen and shook her hand, stiff, she knew the apartment was her domain, the poor guy just a visitor in his own home.

(Greg had explained Julia to her before they came. "Washes her sponge," he'd said. A woman had to wash her sponge now and then, she'd replied. "She runs it through the dishwasher and in case that wasn't enough, she microwaves it. To kill the germs." She'd thought about it a moment. "Your friend Wilson has a problem." "Yep.")

She offered to help in the kitchen, leave the guys alone to talk about her. Seconds later Greg was leaning in the door. "Hey Dani, Wilson figures I must be paying you to be my girlfriend."

Julia gasped. "You did not say that."

"I didn't mean it like that - " Wilson blustered. She wondered if he set himself up for Greg that easily all the time. "I just said there's no way… well, what I meant was …"

She smiled to make him feel at ease. "If he is, I haven't seen any of the money yet."

Dinner was talk about health care and whether the wine went with the fish. When Greg went off to help Julia feed the dishwasher (no idea where _that_ came from, other than that he wanted to see whether she'd put the sponge in again) she and Wilson were alone for a while. Talk turned to Greg.

"He's a really good doctor, isn't he?" she asked.

The slow smile said a lot. "If you're looking for bedside manner and emotional support, you'd be better off buying a houseplant. If you're truly dying of a mysterious disease, he's the go-to guy."

"You mean, he doesn't give up."

He studied the air for a moment. "Ever see a pit-bull really chomp down?"

She liked him.

They had after-dinner drinks (Julia's choice) and hospital stories (Wilson's). Either he tended to exaggeration too or medicine was that insane. She let them know she suspected the one about the MP3 player was an urban legend.

"It is now," Greg said. He downed his scotch. "People are stupid."

"This is where you say, Present company excepted."

"Present company not excepted. You're stupid. I'm stupid. Me being aware of it, though, may keep me from doing stupid things."

"And you're rude to other people in order to…"

"Shake them up. Keep them from doing stupid things too."

"Get it?" Wilson told her. "He's saving the world, one insult at a time."

She remembered something she'd read. "Freud says civilization started the first time someone threw an insult instead of a spear." She could feel Greg turn to stare at her, the finger caressing the back of her neck grown still.

"Oh, right," Wilson groaned. "Encourage him. Now he's promoting civilization with every put-down."

"Hey, it's why my patients love me."

"The only patient who ever loved you was an eighty-year old with syphilis. I still have the love poem she wrote him, Dani. You should hear it -"

"I burned it."

"Not the copy I made." He rummaged in a drawer behind him.

The struggle that ensued, Greg trying to perforate the sheet of paper with his cane from across the table before Wilson could read it aloud, and the flaky poem that followed left her teary-eyed with laughter. Greg actually blushed, something she hadn't known was possible, and when she pointed it out to them, adoring the bright red flush on his face while she made it worse (chances for her to derail him like that were few and far between and she knew he forgave her) she caught a glimpse of Wilson's cautiously happy look.

And later in bed, with Greg so deep inside her, gently probing, pulling out to the very edge and sliding back in, their sweat mingling, she remembered that look, and was relieved, because it meant that the fear she had begun to harbor - that he had no one else in the world except her - was not true.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

_G._

It was a problem in edge definition.

As the weeks melted, his edges bled into hers. If he had even wanted to separate her from him now, he would have had to tear into himself. He knew Wilson watched him like a rabid ICU nurse, wary and wondering, while his fellows just took their luck in stride. He was altered. The gray rush his days had once been had slowed to a stroll (still with a limp, though), allowing moments to shine through.

Thy had exchanged keys and some mornings he woke, having gone to bed without her, to find she had slipped in late after a performance without waking him just to sleep beside him. Her back against his so warm and …known that it registered for a second as a part of him. Edge definition. He would turn to watch her sleep, never bored by her beauty as he was by the model-perfect faces modern life said he should love. Her face held a gorgeous that had nothing to do with glamour, big hair or make-up; there was a swept-clean simplicity about it, so that he found himself making moronic comparisons in his head: a wheatfield rustling in a single rhythm, a still lake.

He wanted to get inside her head, something he could have said of at best three people in his entire life. He had a new whiteboard to work on - hers - and it was already full of contradicting lines and arrows.

Bright nuggets of conversations allowed him to piece her together.

"Greatest fear?"

"That nothing's real." Dani gazed out across Lake Carnegie, silver in the cool of evening. The chatter from the bar behind them might have been surf. Lights had begun to flicker on, far away from the bench they sat on. It was late September. Her hair smelled of leaves.

"You're afraid there's no meaning."

"I'm afraid there's no…physical. That I could be sitting in a padded cell and the doctors are wondering who I'm talking to. How would I know?"

A thought that prodded his own fears. No use telling her that. "Would it matter if you didn't?"

"Spoken by a true solipsist."

"- if we were the only two real things in the universe? Us and the bench here."

"It's hard enough."

_Would it matter?_ He told her about Stacy, in little one-act pieces, over time dredging up the whole sordid, stupid leg thing, making no judgment calls as to what Stacy might have felt (just the facts, ma'am), and then letting it drop again. Dani seemed to absorb it. One night over prawns at Half Moon's, in the middle of an entirely different conversation, she asked: "Why did Stacy leave you?"

He let his surprise fill the silence for a moment. "You want to know the truth or what I think?"

"The truth is impossible to know. I imagine Stacy doesn't even know why."

"Can you imagine why?"

"Might have had something to do with you being a total jerk." When she smiled at him like that he wanted to store it up, take it back out sometime later when he needed it. No man should have to go through life without a woman looking at him like that.

He bent his head over his plate, trying to stop his own grin. "Right."

"Still makes her an idiot."

He probed whenever he could, just good doctoring. One day she mentioned she hadn't told her mother back in Pittsburgh about him. He pounced. "Why not?"

"I would have to tell her how old you are and she would freak. I told my sister on the phone. She found it hard enough to swallow."

"At least that means this father-fixation thing hasn't come up before."

"Is that what you think it is? I'm glad you've got it figured out, Herr Doktor."

She seemed obsessed with his work and he tried to describe the ducklings to her, Cameron coming the easiest.

"You know the four stages of loss. Well, Cameron _starts _in the acceptance stage - everyone's nice, everything's good - and as soon as whoever she's getting to know turns out to be a jerk, she moves straight to denial, where she basically sticks until further notice. Or until something nudges her back to acceptance, where it starts all over again. That's the gamut of her responses."

"Is that what happened in her relationship to you?"

He gave her his you-got-me grimace. "There goes that telepathy again." He shrugged. "Cameron operates on dream math." He'd used the phrase before, and Dani had understood it immediately. It was what he called the way most people saw life, a kind of magical thinking, their conviction that they could influence matters just by peter-pan believing hard enough. It was the opposite of his own philosophy: do the math, the real math, and you could reduce life down to a few numbers that always applied - if you did _this_, then _that_ happened - _always._ Dani had listened and then told him - while he stared off into space pretending it didn't bother him - that his was just an inverse dream math, that he had convinced himself he could get a handle on life's chaos with logic instead of letting it wash over him like everyone else did. That he'd drown one day clutching his numbers, amazed at the last minute that they didn't work. "Bodies are predictable, Greg. Minds aren't. And it's minds you work with, not just bodies. The mind rules, or we wouldn't be human, just machines. Dream math _is_ the math you have to apply if you're dealing with people. You're the one who's in denial about that."

Her peopleness frightened him. They went to the MOMA (her idea - a Dali exhibition, she'd told him. Salvador or Barbie? he'd asked). Splotches of cool color, no meaning.

"It's sperm," she told him as they contemplated a canvas of wiggly white shapes.

"Now did Barbie Dali actually say that?" She didn't know. "I should have blown two bucks on a guide."

He watched her as she approached a man with a guide book on the other side of the room (younger than him, _lots_ better dressed) and asked if the book said anything about the painting, watched them laugh, the man reacting to her like a tissue sample to the right test, as reliable as chemistry. They'd known each other since the start of evolution. When she turned to come back, he glanced away before she could see he'd been watching.

"No sperm," she told him.

"That a fact?"

It was Chase who made him understand. A simple gesture, the Aussie snatching up his bottle of Vicodin as it sat on the conference table, just wanting to read the dosage apparently, out of boredom. He set it back down when he saw his boss's face. But the second had told him something - the twinge as a hand not his own had closed over what was his, what he needed, watching it lift away from him. He had to stop himself from shouting _Give that back_! It explained the dread he felt some mornings waking up to feel her pressed against him, when fear should have been the furthest thing from his mind. She might not be planning to leave him on her own, but she could be snatched away.

She persuaded him to attend another performance (the costumers had gone all out on Dani, little hot-pant item with fringe; made him keep his coat over his lap all evening), and the male lead he'd paid no attention to the first time - long blond ponytail, cut torso - caught his attention. He and Dani were the stars of the show. When Ponytail lifted her over his head (her crotch as close to his face as it could get without taking her hot-pants off, and under the guy's own formidable muscle power) it twisted his gut in a way he wished he could put a stop to. The program called him Georg. Georg the German apparently ran the place.

He told her he could pick her up after a rehearsal (he'd catch hell from Cuddy for skipping clinic but he didn't care). The room when he finally found it (one flight up, no elevator, his leg already aching) reeked of sweat and a more acrid musk, might as well call it youth, October sun through the giant windows glinting off bodies, their chatter, the fast fluid moves - and slow erotic ones - the quickest way to a headache. Two different kinds of music collided at the room's center - how did they practice like that? He was early, not too early or she might guess it was deliberate, and she wasn't finished. He stood on the edge to watch. And was watched, he noticed. Enough of them knew who he was, he took it. Ponytail was slo-moing some pas de deux thing with Dani that obviously needed _close_ coordination, wrapping his marble arms around her. Positioning her. They moved like one person (he strangled the thought before it could reach his face). The guy was the alpha dog, all right, barking orders when she didn't dance it right, that apparently being often, though he didn't know how you could tell. The bossman seemed truly angry with her and that surprised him. It was the wrong thing, the symptom that pointed to something else. When he saw Ponytail's eyes sliding toward his corner when he figured he wasn't looking, he thought he knew. And when the guy yelled at her again and it wasn't English, his head began to throb. He had to do something.

He sidled over to the dancers grouped near him. "What burr got under his foreskin?" he asked them. It broke them up, one guy - South American by his looks - snorting his water through his nose, and he saw their boss glance over at the noise. From their general replies it appeared Adolf wasn't always this bad and certainly not with his star diva. Meant the guy's mood was all for him. Which meant one thing.

Male rivalry.

Easiest diagnosis in the world.

He stopped watching the German, keeping his eyes on the snorter instead because it provided him more insight, and after a moment he caught it - a glance that was not a smirk as much as it was pity. A wonder-if-the-guy-knows look.

Then Dani was in front of him, going up on her toes to kiss him. "Let's get out of here," he told her.

And they ended up in a bar with half the troupe. Hadn't wanted to, but she could do that to him, and there were surprises. The guy who did a rail of coke while Dani leaned across saying, "Shel, you know he'll fire you if he sees that." When the guy proffered him some, he waved him off, telling them the LSD he'd dropped the week before had been enough, and when they laughed (Dani caressing his arm, my boyfriend the comedian) he let them think it was a joke. Then Shel was suddenly hiding his stash, everyone going quiet a little too fast, and a swish of words came from behind him. Elvis was in the building. Dani swished something back. He'd heard her speak German before - the bakery on Third, a phone call to her sister. Whenever he tried to give her medical advice, mostly on eating more, she would smile and say, Jawohl Herr Doktor (his inevitable reply being, Just call me Mengele). Yet she had always translated for him. The fact that she didn't now, that they didn't switch over, Ponytail running on for half a minute before turning to be introduced (that hand casual on her shoulder), was all so rude - and he knew from rudeness - that it was like a slap in the face.

"Greg -" Dani touched his leg and he turned, making it nonchalant. "Meet Georg." She said it _Gay-Org_.

He leaned back. "So you're the Nazi who runs this concentration camp."

The stunned silence at the table left a hole in the bar's noise.

"And I run it very well." Apart from the narrowed eyes, Gay-Org recovered quickly, had to give him that.

"You've got them all goose-stepping. That's good." The utter quiet got a tad quieter. Didn't any of them ever get in the guy's face? They acted like they figured he'd be marched out back now and shot. Without looking at her, he knew Dani's mouth had become that small hard line.

"Let's start all over," she said too cheerfully. "Georg, this is Greg."

Ponytail smiled. "Who will not be goose-stepping any time soon, I believe."

"Oh, _nice_!" He could almost like the guy if he hadn't taken such a dislike to him. He turned to Dani. "You might as well give up."

"I - just did."

He hooked a chair over with his cane. "So why don't you sit that tight little butt down, Gay-Org, and drink with us."

And later:

"Why did you go for Georg's throat like that?"

Dani had been quiet the rest of the evening while Ponytail talked about his years in London (hence the funky mixed accent), even quieter on the way home.

"Rude people do that to me."

"The master speaks."

"Autonomic reflex."

"Also known as knee-jerk." She leaned against his piano, studying him. Her eyes gave him the jitters. "He hadn't said anything to you to be rude with."

"No, he said it all to you, didn't he?"

"Mom, he started it." Her gaze narrowed. "So we always speak German with each other. So what?"

_Even in bed_. He fingered the bottle of pills in his pocket. "Guy just needs taking down a notch or two."

"This is jealousy, isn't it?" Her voice had turned wondering, a little smile hooking the corners of that perfect mouth, the same suppressed delight she'd shown when he blushed at Wilson's. My boyfriend the joke.

"_Not_ jealousy. Envy maybe. I always wanted a ponytail like that." He lowered his voice. "They're phallic symbols, you know. All that limpness."

She pushed off from the piano to stand close, her clean scent of air and rain edged now with bar smoke. He wanted to touch her. His hand in his pocket tightened on the bottle.

"I'm going to assume it is jealousy," she said.

"Then you'll have your reasons for doing so."

It wiped the smile off her face. He went in the kitchen, dry-swallowed two of his babies and chased them with scotch from a half-empty bottle. She watched him from the door.

Maybe they weren't doing it. Maybe the moments, very late, when he lifted her hand from where it pressed his chest, ran his lips down her wrist, her forearm, caressing the hairs there, nuzzling into the crook of an elbow as if looking for a vein, drinking her scent there where it was strong - maybe that simple intimacy with her was his alone. Yet the fact remained that someone else did that with words. He knew enough of neurology to imagine how a language you'd grown up with clicked inside the brain. The guy caressed her mind. Apart from the dancing, they had the intimacy of a shared language, when he couldn't even always get it right with her in English. And wasn't the dance just another kind of pillow talk? One he could never aspire to. Ponytail lifting her, sliding her down his chest, his mouth close to her mouth, her tits…. He realized his hand was rubbing his leg and he made himself stop.

She was saying something. Jealousy was insecurity and how could anyone so self-assured. She analyzed too much, her only fault. I'm as self-assured as the next cripple with a cane, he thought at her. Made him want to laugh and that was the stuff kicking in. Either she didn't know the effect she had on men, impossible, or she didn't realize how she let herself be manipulated by them. Without warning he slapped his hand down on the countertop, not quite a slam, just enough to make her stop and stare, and in the harshest voice he could muster while she stood there like that, he said, "Come over here."

When she walked over to stand in front of him he turned away and poured himself another drink. "Just wanted to see if you would. There's your _wrong signal_." Her mouth fell open.

"That was - what - a test?"

"There are certain men you don't want to obey when they order you around like that."

"I usually don't."

"You do with Gay-Org."

"He's my boss."

"And what am I?"

Her gaze, locked on his eyes, softened, the silky look from a hundred moments in bed, the one he couldn't do without anymore. "You're…you."

But who was he? Dani thought she knew him, but if he ever let loose with what he was capable of it would be the end of it. She'd bolt like anyone else not bound by a job contract to hang around with him. He hadn't wanted to force the learning curve, but his little test had been more of a test than she realized.

Just the fact that she hadn't flipped him off and walked out got her an A+.

She was tough. Few of those he knew could give back as good as they got from him. Stacy, of course. Wilson, who was not good at it, too moralizing. Cuddy. Of his fellows, only Foreman did occasional justice to the art of the come-back. Dani was different. It was as if she was immune to his worst utterances, as though some antibody in her filtered out the bad and left only understanding. She said whatever she wanted back to him, about his leg, his attitude. She played with him, but her teasing always managed to tease out something serious.

Moments. "You look great in peach." She wore her peach robe and he leaned against the counter watching her throw breakfast together. Time leapt out at him now as it never had before, breakfasts and noons and nights fully felt.

"Am I peachy?"

"I could march you right back into the bedroom."

She gave him her tease glance. "You couldn't march anyone anywhere. Oh, you might insult them into bed, or browbeat them into bed -"

He reached across and whacked her bottom lightly with his cane.

The change was so sudden it scared him. She whirled on him, furious.

"Don't _ever_ do that again! What do you think I am?"

He gave a chastised-puppy shrug and studied her from the side, his curiosity fired.

"Well, what?"

"Methinks the lady doth not like it for a reason." He waited. "Bad experience?" Another thought occurred. "_Good_ experience?"

"Stop it." She sighed. "Okay. I had this boyfriend -"

He groaned. "Why do all your stories start like this?"

"We'd been screwing like minks for two weeks when he announced he was…into spanking. And wanted to."

"You him or he you?"

"He me."

He couldn't hold back the grin. There were so few opportunities to embarrass her. "And…you let him. Did you enjoy it?"

"I felt like an idiot. I broke up with him shortly thereafter."

"How shortly?"

"About forty minutes." They were both laughing now, but he grew quiet and watched her.

"I've come to know your looks," she said, "but I can't figure that one. It's either How-could-you or it's Dani-I-was-wondering-how-to-tell-you-this."

He realized what she was getting at. "Nooo. Not into B&D or S&M, or any of those other letters."

"Whew."

"Ditto. As if I need role-playing. I do enough of that at work." He studied her. "Maybe a little rape now and then."

"Rape's okay." He pretended shock. "Women have rape fantasies, Herr Doktor. It's just the Rape That Never Was. It's the incredibly-handsome-man-ties-you-up-and-has-his-way rape. Never the thug-beats-you-to-a-pulp-then-sticks-rusty-objects-up-you-when he-can't-get-it-up rape." A notion crossed her face at the same moment it occurred to him. She looked him up and down. "You would have to be very fast," she whispered.

As she started to move he snatched her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. It would have been hard to hold her even if they hadn't both been laughing, but dance classes apparently included one called Slippery Moves because she did something that felt anatomically impossible and was out and mamboing away. He spun from the counter to make a grab for her and came down hard on the wrong leg.

The pain shot all the way to his head. He let out a cry he managed to pinch back into a gasp - the kind of sound he would have done anything never to let her hear - and caught himself on the back of a chair.

She was at his side, alarmed. "Is it your leg?"

"Came down wrong." He kept his head turned.

"Will it be all right?"

"Shut up!"

The words were out before he could stop them. In the space between their bodies they sounded alien, too loud. They were from another world, the ugly one he dwelt in with others, yet she absorbed them and they were gone. As if she grasped by instinct that they weren't directed at her, but at everything other than her - life, himself. He tried to straighten.

Her voice was low. "Maybe we could just cut to the chase." She stepped closer. "I mean, to after the chase. We could pretend you already caught me." He turned to stare. She was amazing. As though he'd just stubbed his toe, hey let's get back to the important stuff. The best reaction he could imagine. Oblivious - or determined to be oblivious - to his pain. Another A plus.

Yet when he looked in her eyes a tingling crept over him. She was biting her lip, pupils brighter with desire than he'd ever seen them, something there was turning her on, and the notion he'd relegated to a dark closet since the first night flashed in his mind, doors cascading open, other circuits closing. _No, don't let it be that_.

Forget that. Her body was pressed to him now, his cock swelling so fast it was scary - had to be bad for the vascular system - then he had her on the floor, wrists pinned with one hand while he flung her robe open with the other, breasts too small to sag to the side, always standing straight up at attention for him, dark plum aureoles so large they seemed to make out half the pink flesh, nipples that hardened under his lips, the unglazed tiles hard against his knees, his own hardness crushed to her stomach, and she groaned and whispered, "This is a nice rape."

Which made him laugh, nooo, no role-playing today, a real attack of the sillies, a sillies tsunami, like some wave of tension crashing, and he rolled off her, breathless with laughter.

"No, don't stop!"

"You _ruined_ it."

She straddled him. "I'll just have to rape you."

"Technically impossible. It'd have to be against my otherwise iron will. Unless you plan to stick some of those rusty objects up me."

"Methinks the guy might like it." At his look: "You're the jailbird."

"One night. Come to think of it, I was so out of it, they could have done anything to me." She looked a question. "They took my children away."

"Ah, that's why you looked so awful the next morning."

"Awful? Whatever happened to incredibly handsome?"

"It was an incredibly handsome awful."

His erection had reached the pain stage. "Do something about this," he murmured.

She turned and straddled him backward, bottom open to his hands, that perfect inverted-heart shape. When she took his cock in her mouth, he thought his heart would explode. It was always like that with her, a fire: blue-hot, scouring everything away. Sanity the first to go. She drew back the moment before he came (her one distaste, he knew) and the kitchen reeled above him, he _needed_ it all too much, even if it was crazy, needed that one moment of utter bliss when she would do anything for him, and he was suddenly forcing her head down, crying, "_Please_, I want to come in your mouth," and then she did and he was, and it was like a little rape.

When she turned back to him, he didn't look her in the eyes. He waited for his heart to slow. She kissed him. "So, are you going to break up with me in forty minutes?" he murmured. Ah, taking cover in the joke that was no joke. Very lame.

She stared. "What?"

"Never mind."

Yes, she was a straight-A student. And no, he didn't trust her, or rather it was his own ability to hold onto her he didn't trust, those nagging little flashes of self-doubt that no one who knew him only superficially would have imagined of him, Mr. Bluster himself, but it all came down to the question of what it was she saw in him. Whether she saw him at all. Whether she ought to.

He searched her apartment one evening while she was gone, expertise (oh, he'd missed his other calling as a detective) leading him straight to: e-mails in German to her sister (too complex to decipher on the spot), sleeping pills in the nightstand (a surprise), tons of laxatives (no surprise, dancers obviously prone to the same flat-tummy obsession as models were) and the diary, dark green leather, tucked away beneath towels in the bathroom cabinet (well-hidden, and what did that say about how she saw him?). Holding the notebook in his hands, he was suddenly shy, a kid who finally gets that date with gorgeous, but what's she really like. And then he realized he wasn't going to read it. Not an attack of conscience, what a thought. It was just that if she was capable of drivel, he told himself, he didn't want to know. He skimmed instead, looking for the name Georg, but nothing jumped out. Then he turned to the date he always had in his head, the night she'd knocked on his door, he couldn't help himself. She'd written just one word underneath the dateline:

Greg

All the pages after it were blank.

He stared so long he forgot where he was. Ran a hand across the letters as though it were her body. It was either very good or very bad. Coming back to himself with a start, he replaced the diary under the towels, leaving not a fold out of place, and returned to his apartment where he sat and watched the red neon bar sign wink on and off.

When she stole in at midnight, expecting him to be asleep, happy that he wasn't and all excited about something that had happened in the performance, he listened, took her in his arms and - without knowing when he had stopped - realized he had started breathing again.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

End of Chapter 2


	3. Winter

Dancers – Chapter 3 (_Winter_)

_A._

His voice mail - _New case, people, get on it_ - had been his usual terse, yet more irritable than it had been for months. As she entered the room she glanced at the chart the nurse handed her, searching out of habit for what might have caught his interest. The patient was female: convulsions, breathlessness, choking. Nothing out in left field diagnostically (she groaned, realizing she was thinking in sports metaphors). Profession: dancer. He had pushed to have the case assigned to him, the nurse had said.

The woman in the bed might have been beautiful once, but now she was too thin, face taut and sallow. She was perhaps fifty-five, vaguely Mediterranean. Another glance at the chart for the name. "Hello, Martha. I'm Dr. Cameron. I'll need to ask you a few quest -"

The door slid open. He hobbled in, followed by a young woman.

It was always the same. That little leap of the heart. On an EKG it would have been a spike. She might have convinced everyone it was gone - and it had shrunk while Warner was there, while week after week she watched him chase his ex-girlfriend with the obsession he reserved for hide-and-seek viruses - but it had returned with a vengeance when the woman left. Not even the rumors of a new girlfriend (Wilson for once adamantly silent on the subject) could make it go away.

He looked her up and down. "History?" The young woman had moved to the patient's side and was assuring her everything would be all right.

"I just got here."

He glanced theatrically at his watch. "Rocking toddlers in the leukemia ward again, huh?"

An inward cringe. He wasn't supposed to know about that, her devoting time to the cancer kids, something Wilson had turned her on to with a remark one day, how so many of the sickest whose parents worked spent their days alone with nurses too busy to do anything more comforting than prick them with needles. She had found that holding them, reading to them and - yes - rocking them loosened that knot inside her. Her secret for a month now, dreading the moment he found out, knowing his scorn would be so scathing she would probably spontaneously combust.

She met his gaze and it was soft.

He took the chart. "Convulsions." Flipped the bedsheet from the patient's legs. The young visitor had stopped talking to listen. She noted with one part of her mind that the woman was beautiful. Not a relative, she would bet, the skin paler than the patient's, though with the same small lithe body, just not dieted down to bones. Almost muscular.

The patient's leg twitched. "Since when are twitches convulsions?" he asked. "Unless we're in the Land of the Giants."

"It's what the admitting wrote."

He checked the admitting doctor's name. "Bornholm wouldn't know his ass from an MRI tube. Other symptoms?" He was actually talking to the patient, had even moved to the head of the bed, where he bent over the woman in a doctorly fashion. Things like that didn't happen. The world ought to end now. She followed his lead, waiting on the other side of the bed. He patted his pocket for a penlight, leaned over and stole hers, and examined the patient's eyes and throat.

"The twitches started three days ago," Martha told him. "Sometimes they last so long it hurts."

"More like spasms? Seizing up?" He pocketed her penlight. She reached across and took it back, noticing that the young woman watched them with a kind of amused fascination.

He checked the pulse and frowned. "Any heart problems?" The patient shook her head. "Get a stat monitor on her."

The visitor spoke up. "You mentioned choking, Martha. Be sure and tell him everything."

"Choking as in I-can't-breath?" He studied the patient. She nodded. "Or as in I'm-about-to-toss-my-last meal." He glanced down at her figure. "Which in your case was probably three days ago. Not a friend of food, are you?"

Martha's eyes narrowed. "I'm a dancer. I stay in shape."

Oddly, he turned to look at the visitor. She shrugged and said, "Par for the profession."

"Apparently."

He tested for a Chvostek sign, tapping the patient's jaw with a finger. It was positive. At each tap, left then right, that side of the woman's face twitched.

She said, "Tetany," before he could. Always that need to impress. He nodded.

"Tetanus?" The young woman sounded shocked. "Where would she have gotten it?"

It was easy for a layman to confuse the two. She felt sorry for the visitor. He would roast her now, serve up some gratuitous slur on her intelligence, or just roll his eyes at her in that way that so eloquently said, _Why me? Why dumb people?_

And in the next instant she couldn't believe what she was hearing. He was explaining. Patiently.

"Tetany, not tetanus," he told the visitor. "Both present with muscle contractions, but tetanus is caused by a toxin. Tetany's caused by some underlying condition. The cell membranes' gateways are staying open. The nerves can't shut up. Sort of like old ladies at a church lunch." He turned. "Do a Trousseau just in case. Excuse my French. And check for renal failure." She nodded.

"Then it's her kidneys?"

She wanted to groan. The woman wouldn't stop, but then she didn't know he had a line, and that she had crossed it.

"No," he said quietly, and again she felt that tweak of surprise at his patience. "Both are symptoms of something else. Hypocalcemia, parathyroid, pancreas." His voice was almost gentle. "We'll find it."

Of course. Beautiful woman. She should have seen it earlier. He was trying to impress the visitor. With his bedside manner. He who had no manners, period.

The fact that he had never even remotely allowed appearances to rein in that mouth of his made her wonder.

"Finish the history," he said and turned to go.

From the bed rose a high keening sound. The patient shot bolt upright, struggling for air. Her arms beat the bed. Every breath she took rasped like nails on a chalkboard.

"She's choking! Nurse!" The nurse was already handing her the intubation tube. The sound from the patient was a steam whistle, excruciating, as air was forced through an ever more constricted throat. _Raasssppp_. Martha's eyes were wide with panic, glassy.

Then House was beside them both. He pushed her hands holding the tube away. "She doesn't need that."

The patient's eyes grew wider. _Raasssppp_. Her fingers snatched at nothing.

"It's a laryngospasm," he explained, explaining nothing. He leaned over the bed and raised his voice. "You struggling for air like this is making it worse." They were all staring at him now. _Raasssppp_. She saw the young visitor's eyes, as wide as the patient's, locked on this bizarre doctor who expressed his unconcern for a choking patient as though it were disgust. He was still leaning over Martha. He looked bored. "Stop breathing!" he commanded.

The absurdity of it shocked them all into silence. Only the keening - painful now in its harshness - went on. Then the young woman grabbed the patient's hand. Something in her eyes had changed.

"Martha, do what he says."

With a supreme effort, the woman stopped struggling. They could almost see her throat relax. The next breath she took was clear and full, without the keening sound, and she fell back on the pillow in relief.

House took his cane from where he'd deposited it on the bed. "It's not just your hands and feet spasming. Your voice box is too. Sucking in air like that collapses the vocal folds even more. They can't open up against that kind of vacuum. Next time it happens, just relax, so the muscles can unclasp. Go to sleep, pretend you already died - whatever helps."

He motioned them out of the room and the visitor followed.

Foreman caught up with them at the door. She saw his appreciative glance at the young woman, the once-over that lingered on the face. Chase was being deliberately late again, she guessed. Since House's lapdog remark the week before he'd been late to every meeting.

Foreman took the chart. "What do we know?"

"You mean, what do you know?" House took it back. "Being a half-hour late does sort of keep you in the dark, doesn't it? Also a _history_ would be nice. Do I see a show of hands?"

She turned to the young woman. "Are you a relative?"

"Just a friend. Her partner's traveling in China. She's directing a dance troupe on tour there. It'll be a while before she can get back."

"A _partner_ in China." House grimaced. "We'll need to think viral."

The woman stared at him. "You know, it's not AIDS just because she's lesbian. They're not at a higher risk -"

His gaze stopped her. The silence grew hair. In a calm voice devoid of sarcasm he asked her: "Did I tell them to test for AIDS?"

"No," she answered just as gracefully.

He looked away, ending the confrontation. "Anyone traveling abroad a lot could have exposed themselves - and their lovers - to any number of fun diseases we deprived Americans hardly ever see." He wiggled his fingers at the two of them, his sign for them to get going. "Bloodwork, tox screen. Those words mean anything to you?"

The woman was facing back toward the room and the monitor. "The numbers on that screen are going down," she said. "Is that good?"

They all turned.

Even with his leg House could move faster than any of them. "Crash cart, in here!" He tossed his cane aside and launched himself into the room. She and Foreman were moving too. "Drop the bed!" The room filled with people, competing alarms. The chaos, she knew, looked just that to anyone not trained - a million people, wires, the shouting - yet it was a kind of dance in which everyone knew his part. House had grabbed the paddles.

He made them go on when others might have given up.

Six shocks.

Seven.

Foreman: "Got a pulse!"

"One amp epi!"

"Normal sinus rhythm."

"She's back." House looked pale. He handed off the paddles.

It was then, with her mind alert and hopped on the stress, that she saw and understood. Forgotten by the crowd around the patient, he was twisting away on his good leg, looking for his cane, oblivious to where he had lost it, and she was there handing it to him, having picked it up outside, when it was the last thing anyone else would think of. The beautiful woman, who had watched him being a doctor with fascination since the moment they stepped in, who had contradicted him and then accepted his explanations with a straightforward grace that she saw now was trust. Who had urged her friend to stop breathing because he said so.

In the restroom later, she stared at herself in the mirror for a long time.

Foreman and Chase had beaten her to the conference room. "Did you catch it?" she asked Foreman. He frowned. She tried to keep her voice flippant. Just churning the rumor mill. "She's his girlfriend."

"The _patient_?"

"The visitor."

"No way."

"I saw them kiss when she left." Her voice must have betrayed her because Chase stopped double-taking between them and looked at her.

Foreman was still shaking his head. "Maybe a…long-lost niece?"

"Not a niece kiss."

Chase shrugged. "So House's got a girlfriend. We've suspected that a while. What's not to believe?"

Foreman spoke almost before she did.

"She's hot." "She's young."

Chase suppressed a wicked grin. "And here comes the cradle-robber now," he whispered.

With little to go on, the conference was brief. He seemed no more agitated than with any other case. He whiteboarded the symptoms, said "Go," and when they didn't respond, spread his arms to heaven in fake panic and yelled, "I've gone deaf!"

"Okay, hypocalcemia." "Hypoparathyroidism." "Pancreatitis."

"Which puts paid to the tetany. But she shouldn't have coded like that. We need to know what's got her heart in a wad."

Chase took it as his cue. "Come on, guys. Try hard now. This is an important case."

He frowned. "All my cases are important. What's your point?"

"Well, if we don't cure this woman, it will make a _really_ bad impression on your girlfriend, won't it?" The Aussie looked overjoyed to get a dig in.

"All my cases are important. What's your point?" The hesitation was so slight she might have imagined it.

As they left, he called her and Foreman back. "Okay, which one of you guessed?" They were silent. "Come on. Here's your chance to earn some brownie points for your powers of observation." Foreman pointed to her.

"I didn't guess," she told him. "I…saw you kissing her."

"God, you really are a moron. You should have let me think you guessed and taken the points. You just _lost_ points for being honest."

In the hall she watched a mother scold her son, a grandpa shake rain from his coat. Halloween was in two days. She would help with the party in the cancer ward, laugh at the kids' costumes. She would go home afterward and pour herself some wine. She thought again of the kiss, that moment when she had turned the corner after the restroom and seen them at the end of the deserted hall, confirming what she had already surmised. How he had bent to the woman, his hand on her shoulder so simple, so proprietary, lifting a finger to brush it along her cheek as their lips met. The look on his face. She wouldn't be able to forget that. She would rock her cancer children and sing to them. She would run lab tests and help cure Martha and then she would go home and try very hard to be happy for him.

……………………………………………………………………………..

_J._

"You going to eat that?"

"No, I bought it because I needed a doorstop."

He watched his Danish, the only thing the cafeteria did well, disappear down House's throat. "Wouldn't have stopped any doors. Too fresh."

"How's your case?"

"Fresh out of ideas." A shadow crossed his friend's face. "We fixed the hypocalcemia, the kidneys bounce back, but now the heart's dragging them down again." He sighed. "The whole thing sucks like Paris Hilton on a good day. Even if there were a viral component it shouldn't be getting worse this fast. Massive damage to the heart. Coded twice again in four days. She's up with the cards now getting a heart cath." He was biting a fingernail. "You know, Dani called me the day this woman collapsed at the theater and asked me to take the case. She's known her for years. Some kind of mentor. Got her into dance school and everything. Like a mother away from Mom. It's just…" The clatter of cafeteria trays almost drowned his next words. "It's the way Dani's been looking at me the past few days."

The depth of worry in the voice startled him. "Disappointment? She thinks you can't cure her?"

"Not at all." He looked up. Not worry. Fear. "She thinks I can. The look…. It says she has no doubt I will."

"That's good, isn't it?"

"And what if I can't?"

…………………………………………………………………………….

He stood in the door and listened to them bandy ideas they'd gone over ten times. Their boss had pushed them and they were tired, but to give House credit he'd pushed himself too. It was almost like the old days, pre-Dani, irritability spreading through the place like an acid pool, radiating from House as the central point, from that spot on his leg he'd started rubbing again.

"It has to be autoimmune," Cameron was saying.

Foreman shook his head. "An infection."

"No. No fever."

"Then she's taken drugs." Chase's solution to everything.

"Tox screen was clean."

House tossed his cane on the table with a clatter that startled them all and ran his hands through his hair. "Dani says this woman's never touched drugs."

"What - everyone lies, except your girlfriend?"

"Yeah." He was staring off into space, not listening. "Think outside the Ecstasy tablet. Non-recreational. What if it were something she thought she was doing herself a favor with?"

"Oh, sure. Narrows it down."

Over his fellows their eyes met. The fear had become panic. "What are you doing here?"

"Just thought I'd interject a little humor and let you know she coded again."

…………………………………………………………………………………

In the long run, he knew, they would uncover what was wrong with the woman - House, born to the role of gadfly, prodding them like reluctant calves toward some answer - but the woman didn't have a long run. She had a heart that might refuse to jump-start the eighth - or tenth - time and without knowing what was causing it Cuddy would never consent to put her on a transplant list.

He stood at the glass, watching Foreman check the patient's vitals. She had shrunk, a tiny lump under the sheet, the oxygen mask she needed all the time the largest thing on her. Cameron came to stand beside him. Behind them, in the lounge area, they could hear House talking to Dani and the other visitor who had been to see the patient twice before, a starkly handsome man with a blond ponytail, small but broad-shouldered. Solid. Another dancer, Wilson assumed. The chatter in the lobby drowned their words, yet House's stance, his knuckles white on his cane, told anyone who knew him that it was an argument.

Snatches of it drifted to them. "What _are_ you doing for her?" they heard the man in the ponytail say. Dani was studying the floor. An elevator pinged and he didn't catch House's reply.

"He's in love with her." Cameron's voice at his side surprised him. She didn't usually remark on the obvious.

"I know," he said.

"God, he's beautiful." Which was just creepy. "Do you think House would introduce me to him?" He realized she had been talking about the blond man. And when he thought about it, she was right - something in the blond man's hand on Dani's elbow, the way he watched her face, said it all. House had to have noticed it too.

"I mean, he didn't even introduce his girlfriend," Cameron went on. "You'd think he was ashamed of her."

"I think he doesn't like the idea of her and his work being in the same world. He's trying to deny that."

Some breaking point had been reached in the discussion. He saw House take Dani's arm and lead her toward them, the blond man right behind them. They stopped at the glass and looked in. He appeared unaware of the others standing there, his fingers so tight on Dani's arm she would surely have bruises the next day.

"All right, tell me what I'm missing!"

For a second Dani looked frightened - not of him, but of that intensity she had probably not seen to this degree before. He wished he were close enough to whisper _Pit-bull_ in her ear.

She seemed to collect herself. Quietly she removed her lover's hand from her arm, a gesture none of them missed, and he saw the blond man's eyes on House narrow in what looked a lot like hate.

"She…lives to dance," Dani said, peering in at the woman. She seemed to understand by instinct the kind of brainstorming he was looking for. "She's afraid of losing that, of growing old. Appearance is very important to her." She was rubbing her arm. "She started gaining weight a while back and drove us all crazy worrying about it."

"When did that stop?" His expression had changed. He was on to something.

"Stop?"

The blond man caught where he was headed. "About a month ago. I noticed she stopped talking about it."

"And has since lost the weight, I bet."

"That and more."

He banged the sliding door open and marched into the room. They followed. When he pulled the woman's mask away, she began to gasp for air. She stared at him with wild eyes.

"She's in A-fib, House!" Foreman looked disgusted.

"What diet aid are you using?" House asked her.

"Not…using…anything."

"I understand. You want to look good. And you will. You'll be the slimmest person at your funeral. Fit in your shroud and everything. Just tell me what you took to lose weight."

The woman shook her head. Her eyes rolled up in her head.

"You're lying on your deathbed." He grimaced at his own pun.

Foreman grabbed the mask from him and placed it back over her. "So we should have done that housecall." His voice was low, directed away from the visitors, but they heard it anyway. House had refrained from his favorite diagnostic tool this time, Wilson knew, because he hadn't known how Dani would take it if she found out about the woman's house being searched.

"Nothing showed on the tox screen anyway," Cameron reminded them.

"Which could mean she had stopped for a while and only started taking it again after you ran the test." House's eyes were already roaming the room. "Maybe she brought a little bit of home with her." He gestured. "Go!"

Cameron and Foreman turned and started searching the locker so fast they might have been robots. Wilson found himself once again wishing he commanded that kind of loyalty, from anyone. House busied himself with the nightstand. Dani and the blond man stared as he flung open drawer after drawer, discarding personal items.

"Darf er das?" the blond man asked. Wilson recognized it as German.

"Asking if I can do this?" House said over his shoulder. He held up a cosmetic bag. "Doing it." The bag proved empty and he tossed it on the bed. "Leave the room, Gay-Org, if you don't want to watch." He threw open the next drawer. "Come to think of it, just leave the room."

A cry rose from Foreman. "Got it!" He held up a small carton. "It's all Chinese."

"Over here." Foreman tossed the carton to House. On the front was a picture of a yellow horse. The rest of the box was covered with Chinese characters.

"Ephedra," House said.

A snort of disbelief flew from the blond man. "You read Chinese, do you?"

"Sure." He turned and saw Dani's open mouth, her eyes moving between admiration and puzzlement. The click was almost visible, the Houseian wheels turning over to _Be honest_. "I read pictures," he corrected. "Yellow horse is another term for ephedra."

"Which is?"

"A Chinese herb. Great in your cold medicine. Not so hot in megadoses straight from the crude plant. Combine it with caffeine as a diet pill and you've got the perfect little grenade for your heart. No wonder hers looks like a Baghdad marketplace. Our otherwise clueless government knows that and that's why it's highly regulated here. Lover-lady probably thought she was doing her girlfriend a service sending back the more potent variety on her travels."

Dani was stroking the patient's arm. The woman's eyes were closed. She might have been unconscious, but a tear trickled down one cheek.

"Martha, this is what's damaging your heart."

"Has damaged it," House interjected. "Should stop progressing once she stops taking it." The silence from every doctor in the room sank in on Dani before it did the blond man. She looked around. House's eyes hadn't left her face. "Finding it also signs her death warrant."

"What does _that_ mean?" It was the blond man.

House still watched Dani. She had retreated a step from him, dropping the woman's hand. When he went on, his voice was gentle. "It means she did this to herself. No one will consent to put her on a waiting list for a heart now."

Dani stared around at all of them as though they had conspired toward this moment, then turned back to him. "Couldn't you just… I mean. Pretend you didn't find it!" She had taken the carton from him and was holding it out to Foreman. "Put it back!" No one moved. House pried the box from her. "We could just… not tell anyone, right? That committee that decides… You said you - "

His warning look bit off her words. She suddenly seemed aware of the others. If House had told her the story of how he'd lied for the bulimic woman, then he was either a fool or his trust went very deep. Wilson could see Dani thinking it through, the fact that there were too many witnesses this time. The blond man had his lips open, listening for her next word, his own wheels turning, a golden predator cat ready to pounce.

"I could try and convince the committee this was a one-time thing," House was saying. "That she didn't know the risks. That it doesn't indicate a psychological disorder. They might buy it. There are things that can be done to the heart she's got. They'll jury-rig it with a bi-vad - that'll hold her a while." His voice was rough. "But she'll never dance again."

Dani nodded.

The doctors left the dancers alone together.

In the hall he stood alone with House. "At least you found out what was wrong with her."

"There's nothing wrong with her." Which made no sense, until he saw him looking back toward Dani. "There's everything right about her." He walked away just as Dani exited the room.

She was shaking her head. She'd been crying. "You think you know a person." It seemed to be his day for ambiguities. He wasn't sure she was talking about the patient.

"There was nothing else he could do," he told her.

"I know that. I wouldn't have him risk his license. _He_ wouldn't have kept his mouth shut." She glanced through the glass at the blond man. "He hates him." Ambiguous again, but it probably applied to both men.

He couldn't help asking. "Why?"

She didn't answer. "He's still going to beat himself up about it." Her hand on his arm caused him to turn and they both watched House until he rounded the corner, cane jabbing the floor as if the floor had done him a terrible wrong. "Things are so hard when he's sad." Her hand tightened. They were conspirators. "You have to convince him I understand."

………………………………………………………………………………

_Wake me up inside_

_Call my name and save me from the dark_

_Bid my blood to run_

_Before I come undone_

_Save me from the nothing I've become._

G.

And so winter wandered in – the cold gnawing away at his scar while she warmed him from within. He cleared the stacked medical journals out of the long-unused fireplace and they shared wine some nights before a roaring fire, something he hadn't done since around the last ice-age. The night of the first frost in November they ended up falling asleep there – _like kids_, his last thought - wrapped in the bear rug, and when a log fell toward morning she woke startled, crying, "Not yet!" He held her. "I dreamed the world was ending," she whispered, "and I didn't want it to."

While everything froze around him something else inside was thawing.

He wondered if she had any real idea what she did for him. She had music on all the time and one song – her favorite for weeks – he took at first to be some kind of message to him every time she slotted in the CD, a chill racing through him when he first understood the lyrics, nonsense really, someone brought back from death by love, the words managing to evoke the image of a coffin – or maybe just a cardiac arrest –without saying so, yet she seemed oblivious to how well the lines fit, humming to the tune as she bustled around him without a glance his way. _My spirit sleeping somewhere cold...Breathe into me and make me real_. He felt soft everywhere then, too vulnerable.

Bring me to life.

She bought him a t-shirt she'd seen that said _No, really - the world DOES revolve around me,_ and he wore it with pride.

Save me from the nothing I've become.

At Thanksgiving he visited his parents while Dani flew to Pittsburgh to be with her family. He couldn't decide when he had last been in the House house. His parents seemed benumbed for a while to see him there, though he had called beforehand. He told his mother about Dani, just enough - no need to get too personal, she was his mother after all - and she watched him all the next day, tremulous, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. He cracked jokes and his father laughed at one. Bad places in the house seemed to fade. It was just a house.

He thought he might be experiencing happiness.

"Going all womanish on me?"

She was curled on the bed painting her toenails, a sight he hadn't seen before. December. The hospital's annual Christmas party was the next night and he was taking her. She would never find out how long he'd debated before mentioning it at all. He hadn't been to the event himself in – well, in ever.

She daubed a toe. "I want to look good tomorrow."

"You look good tonight."

"Fashion definitely not my middle name. Gotta work at it." She'd told him those theories before, how she didn't fit in to other women's ideals of women, that they didn't like her for that reason, too blase about all the things they had to work at, hair and waistlines and home decorating. The fact that she couldn't care less about fashion. ("Why should you," he'd said. "You'd look good in rags." "I _think_ that's what they don't like," she'd replied.)

She glanced at him now. "Allow me my nervousness. Everyone's going to be oh so curious about your trophy girlfriend."

A little flutter. Anger. "Is that what you think you are?" The harsh voice startled her.

"No," she murmured. Then: "Stop that – you're going to mess up my nail polish!"

"You're a dancer. Just keep your legs up in the air."

The big night, whooo. He dressed alone, then slipped over to her place just late enough to make them late. She wore a chiffon sheath, pale-green, just off the shoulders. He had thought only mermaids in cartoons glowed like that.

"Wow!"

"Is it too much? Or not enough?"

"It's just right, says Goldilocks. Wearing any jewelry with that?"

"I don't know what yet."

"Try this." She gazed at the gift-wrapped package a moment before taking it.

"What have you done, Greg?"

"Just open it."

"Is this some of that money I haven't seen?"

"This is me being a sugar daddy. A little flash to drape my lady." She was grinning. "Got to decorate my trophy."

"As long as I don't have to sit up on the mantelpiece."

She looked at the necklace a long time before running a finger across the emeralds. Shock maybe. _Genuine_, he wanted to say, but even he realized that would be crass. He'd amazed himself by buying it without turning the tag over first.

Delicately she said, "Is this where I jump up and down screaming thank you and throw my arms around your neck?"

"Do that and I'm taking it back."

"Put it on me."

And as usual he proved himself sadly lacking in the really important skills like getting a necklace out of its box and around a woman's neck. She smiled as he fumbled. "Haven't done this often, have you? Which is comforting to know."

He finished. "Trophy decorated." His eyes met hers in the mirror for a second - he couldn't help himself, she glowed – but the second became a moment and oh hell, that made it a ritual, she was being _knighted_ for christsake; their eyes were saying something to each other about how important the evening was, but he wasn't having any of it. "Let's go. Your pumpkin carriage awaits."

She glowed in the taxi and in the lobby and she glowed as he held the door for her, bending to whisper, "There you go with the hair again - I _forbid_ you to be nervous," not sure who he meant, not himself of course because nothing ever made him nervous. Entrance decidedly ungrand, they were late, so half the place was already bored, the other half already drunk, reaction time slowed in either case, but then they began to congregate and for a moment he knew what it must feel like to be high-functioning autistic - too many faces soaking him up, voices grating, too curious. People had spurned him so thoroughly for the last five years that he'd forgotten how to be at the center of attention, even if it was an off-center. Made him want to just leave in disgust, but jeez mommy was there, a hand on his arm, her peopleness would do for both of them. Chase did a very satisfying chin-on-the-floor routine when he first saw her, Cuddy the gracious-brusque she was so masterful at. People outside his admittedly small circle were all of a sudden buddies needing an introduction - doctors who hardly knew him, nurses who knew him and hated him – he figured they had to have been communicating through getaloadofthegirlfriend-dot-com. Dani skated through it all.

He'd forgotten there would be dancing.

Cuddy with Foreman, Wilson with Cameron, Wilson with the pert-ass blonde from maternity. The possible permutations were endless.

Dani with Chase.

Salsa, Chase's choice, who had an in with the DJ, mainly because she'd sneered, "You? Salsa? Like hell." And they were good, upper bodies apart, the proud stance that made it regal, but down in the nether regions, boy, you couldn't have slipped a lab slide between them there. Not a problem. He was pretty sure she didn't go in for men until they were of an age to start shaving. Coming from the restroom later, that section of hall dim and deserted, he froze at the voices from around the corner.

"You're certainly cute enough." A weighty silence. "That accent would wow any woman."

The accent shifted, rubbed against the wall. In the lonely hall it sounded as though he'd moved closer. "So," said the accent, "what am I doing wrong?"

"I've known you for an hour, Robert. I'm supposed to figure out for you why you can't get a girlfriend?"

"I just wanted an opinion, a general impression, from someone who ought to know."

"And I gave it." More silence. "Women should be all over you. Beats me if they're not."

"How about this: my boss is so obsessive he allows me no time for a social life."

"There you go. All his fault." She laughed (his hand locked on his cane relaxing, blood flooding back to his chest because he knew that one, it said here's a man I don't take seriously, the laugh she had never directed his way. Yet.)

"Except he found time for you, didn't he? The question is what you see in him. Come on, comparison time. Differential diagnosis. What's House got that I haven't?"

"If I had to explain it you wouldn't understand."

"It's just a pity, you know. You're wasted on hi – Wait, that's _it,_ isn't it?" The Aussie chuckle held amazement. "It's _pity_. Of course. The cane and - and the bitterness. Come on, tell me I'm right. I'll go out and get myself an infarction and I'll be attractive too." (He leaned his head against the wall, eyes closed, waiting for her answer.)

Her voice was one he'd never heard before. "You are _way_ out of line." A rustle.

"No, don't go. I'm sorry – I was wrong. It's because he's such a...gentleman and – and so sexy – no, wait !" The sounds faded around the corner.

He took a roundabout way back to the party.

She was already deep in discussion with a very drunk Wilson. As he approached he heard her say Greg.

"Taking my name in vain?"

She smiled up. "James still can't figure out what I see in you." It so echoed the conversation with Chase it made him cringe. They were going to have to get past this Beauty and the Beast scenario. "He's decided it can't be the sex."

He cocked an eyebrow at Wilson. "How do you know? You've never had sex with me."

A drunken groan. "And we will keep it that way."

Hours later, the table having winnowed down to his clique (another cringe at the thought that he even had such a thing), the talk turned to medicine, or what passed for it at late hours. They would never have hung around him, he knew; it was Dani they were drawn to, moths-to-the-flame, but he didn't mind basking in the glow. He was there with her, a hand at her back; the others were trappings. It was as though they danced alone on a crowded floor. Someone mentioned his latest case.

"Whoa," Dani interjected. "you're treating a supermodel? That must be pleasant." She turned to the others. "Funny, he hasn't mentioned this to me."

"Why?" he said. "Do you think you can cure her?"

"Maybe. I've learned a lot about medicine the past few months. Doctors get off at four in the afternoon, get a call at 2 a.m in which they order more tests, preferably in a loud irritated voice, and then go back to bed. I could start practicing tomorrow."

"She had to look up nephrology," he told them, joking, but she glanced at him in surprise and more than a little embarrassment.

"I really did. Actually I typed nephology at first by mistake."

"That's a word?"

"It's the study of clouds."

"_That_ -" His eyes met Wilson's across the table – "is the coolest description of what we do that I've ever heard."

"You haven't seen this supermodel, Dani," Foreman told her, "or you'd know why he took the case." The black man's hands cupped at his chest were unambiguous.

He made a show of staring dream-lost into space. "Those babies do go all the way to the Canadian border, don't they?"

Dani was grinning at him. "I just hope for your sake, Herr Doktor, that it's a gynecological problem."

"It will be if I diagnose it right."

Cuddy gave a drunken snort. "You would think, House, now that you're getting some of your own – _sorry_ –" she nodded to Dani, " -that it would curb that lechery of yours a little."

"Oh, don't you know," Dani informed them, "I'm not _big_ enough for him." Her hands echoed Foreman's. "One of the first things he let me know."

Amid the general cries of disbelief at the appalling extent of his lechery Chase leaned across Cameron, almost falling on her, and brought his face close to Dani's. "I just want you to know," he slurred, "that chest size is not a problem with me."

Dani studied his chest. "Yes, it is."

More general hilarity. He took the moment to whisper in her ear, "I want to get you out of here. Get you home and show you chest size is not a problem with me either."

"I know that already," she whispered back, and looked at him.

He kissed her.

He knew what an exotic thing it was, there in front of others, his public displays of affection for her rarely (as in _never_) having gotten beyond a finger caressing the back of her hand beside his on a table, a strand of hair brushed from her face...some shielding mechanism reserving every possible intimacy for when they were alone. And kissing – well, lips had a lot of nerve endings. So said his logical side. He thought of the hooker, the one excruciatingly shameful memory among his many shameful hooker memories, the repeat, who was there for maybe the fourth time, a nice kid, when it struck him how long it had been since anyone had kissed him on the lips, three years since Stacy left, how the desire to feel a mouth on his had hit him so hard it left him nauseous, so that he had ended up begging her like a baby, despising himself for needing to, while she kept refusing, promising her double, triple, until she finally did and that little bit of her skin on his little bit of skin had sent feelers deeper into the pit of his being than any orgasm could have. How she had never come back. So there was something about kissing and especially about kissing Dani there now - long and lost inside it - in front of people who spent a lot of their time studying him like a bug under a microscope and with as little real affection.

"Get a room." It would have to be Wilson who would comment.

He turned from Dani. Half of them were watching, the other half studiously not watching. "Sure," he said. "Must be a broom closet around here somewhere."

"So you can get in your fifteen minutes."

"Fifteen minutes? I'll have you know we're down to eight."

Dani, always fast on the uptake: "It is the national average, James. Google it." Then to him: "Actually I think we were down to six."

"You sure?"

"I was timing it."

"Stopwatches are a wonderful invention."

They were all watching now. Wilson sighed. "You two deserve each other."

Dani beamed at him. "Why, James, that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said."

So it was important and it wasn't. It was just a party. At home she drew him toward the bedroom, unambiguous, hand clasped in his, and he drew her back.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I want to dance with you."

It might have been a movie, the romantic scene ending with the needle knocked from the record, screeeeech. Her face said it, mouth undulating from desire to disbelief. "You can't dance, Greg."

His stubborn streak reared its impish little head and he tugged her to him.

She leaned her face on his chest and sighed. "Why do you do this?"

"Do what?"

"You make everything be about your leg." He tried to sway, not about to admit it might have ruined the evening. Her body was a stone. "You know what I want from you, Greg? I want you to make love to me, and talk to me, and be there when I wake up in the mornings." She looked up and her eyes held puzzlement. "I don't want you to walk for me." As if a decision had been reached, she stepped away from him, to the stereo. "We'll do it right, then."

The music she put in was old and sappy. "No, keep your cane in your hand," she told him. "You'll want to get on and off the dance floor without looking like Quasimodo." Made it a dance lesson, to his chagrin, positioning his one free arm, and within a few minutes they swayed together, albeit woodenly, every second step more a hump of his cane than a glide. Her lips close to his: "Did you dance, before your leg?"

"Just the slow-dancing that everyone can do."

"That everyone thinks they can do."

"Point taken."

The cane made it slower than slow-dancing, more like continental-drift dancing, but they made a circuit around the room, the piano. His chest felt oddly full, an erection of the heart, that mirrored the other one further down; he knew she felt it too when her hands wandered lower to stroke his hips, and he crushed her close, the thin dress bunched between them. Any minute now he would stop this foolishness, lift her onto the back of the couch, she would wrap her legs around him, glorious end to the evening, oh but let the flaky song go on a while. She sang - badly - in his ear: _Love is like an energy rushing in, rushing inside of me. _She sang, _I'm so in love with you_.

…………………………………………………………………………..

_D._

She was so in love with him.

He was a puzzle being pieced together with tender care, gone over so many times he had mapped himself onto her mind. She had seen another side of him when he was treating Martha, how the obsession she had always watched from the outside came to be applied in practice, the pit-bullheadedness, heedless of privacy or convention, how it repelled anyone who came near him. She had absorbed it, even loved it, just another piece of the puzzle locked in.

Some days she thought she had him figured out.

He hated parties, a truth she had seen at Christmas in the way he'd damped down in the onslaught of the hospital crowd, his hand against the small of her back all evening, playing almost unconsciously with the sash there, only boisterous again in the more immediate circle around the table, and so it was natural that he would despise a raucous New Year's bash thrown by dancers. And yet there they were. Too much music, Georg's high-ceilinged uptown apartment like a nautilus shell, amplifying the sound through rooms that spiraled and led back into one another. And he hated her friends, the exception being Arturo the Chilean, with his wide-open South American humor, who made him laugh by calling him a _matasanos_ and trying to waltz with him every time he saw him. No, he was there because she asked him to. One hand on his cane, the other at her elbow, until the dancing started, when he found a chair to straddle backward and watch. He was in top form, clear-eyed (she had gotten good at noting the subtle glassiness, the pupils not quite meeting hers, that spelled two Vicodin). Someone broke the mirror left leaning fashionably against the wall, Georg cursing in German and swearing to them it had been an antique, until Greg's voice cut across the crowd: "Ikea dynasty, twenty-first century - that'll cost ya!" and the moment had passed. When Georg asked her to dance, in German no less, she shook her head.

"Go on." Greg's voice at her ear startled her.

"I don't need to dance." She hadn't forgotten his indifferent, stunned look when she'd danced with Robert Chase at the Christmas party.

"Are you disobeying a direct order?"

"Nein, mein Herr."

He drew closer to whisper. "You may think I don't like watching you dance with other men and you're right, but I like watching you dance. Do me the favor."

She let Georg lead her away.

It was a mistake.

He caught her later as she returned from the bathroom. The bedroom hadn't changed, iconic macho furnishings, blue silk sheets on the huge bed. He blocked her way, trapping her against the dresser. She put her hands on his chest, a slight pressure, and they stood like that, as though poised for the first beat of a dance performance.

"Please don't start." His apartment was a tactical nightmare, any room approachable by several others, and one part of her noted the door to the dark hall had stayed open just the tiniest crack. "Someone could come in."

"Just a question, Dani." He spoke in German again, pronouncing her name with the long Ah so that it sounded like Donny, which always reminded her pleasantly of her father. He'd taken his hair down at some point, long blond strands falling near her face as he leaned in. She should have known he had drunk enough to be in one of his moods, his eyes had said it while they danced, but she'd ignored them. "You owe me an answer, for the sake of us."

"There's no us, Georg. There hasn't been for a year. When does it stop? When do you see you can't keep doing this?" Her own German sounded foreign to her, the year since they'd been a couple having rung so many changes that emotion no longer fit the language, his body - though she danced with it every day - that of a stranger.

"I'd just like to know - I need to know…what it is about him. Why?"

She remembered what she had said to Robert Chase. _If I have to explain it, you wouldn't understand_. Yet she found herself wanting to explain it to Georg, as she might have a child, and she moved her fingers down to hold his wrists where his hands, knuckles white, pressed either side of the dresser, pinning her in. When she looked up, she could almost see Greg's face superimposed on his, the thought making her voice when she spoke gentle.

"I'm in love, that's all, Georg. For the first time in my life, I'm truly in love." From his look, she knew her own face must have shone with every bit of that emotion.

_(...and something red and hot plowed across her chest, her throat, an iron taste in her mouth, oh it was despair, disappointment, her leg crushed by his weight though he hadn't moved, all of her in pain…)_

It was gone again. The sensation left her breathless, so at odds with what she had just been feeling it made her think of schizophrenia. Georg, seeing her confusion though not understanding it, took the chance to press against her and kiss her, blocking out the light, the door, even that strange momentary flash that still warped her thoughts, and for a moment, out of pity, she let him (pity would be her downfall), not kissing back, before easing him away.

She found Greg in the kitchen, entertaining a small crowd with the bloodier stories from his career. He barely glanced at her. She'd heard the tales before, though the diseases appeared to grow more fiendish with each telling. By the time they were ready to leave he had admirers. They looked at him differently. It let her risk a joke at his expense when Arturo teased him at the door. "Watch out," she said. "He'll beat you up with his cane."

Snow had dusted the town golden in the light of sodium lamps. They drove in silence, snowflakes beating against the windshield, and the silence sank in on her slowly, the gist of his face never turning to look at her. After a while she took a breath and asked: "Is it the cane remark you're mad about?"

For a second he looked merely puzzled. "What remark?"

Silence. The snow made a fairy world, yellow glitters of other cars' headlamps and one red orb growing larger and larger because he wasn't braking and she gasped, her cry "That light's red!" snapping him out of his awful reverie too late. He slammed the brakes, spun them into the intersection. Her heart flipped. Cross traffic screamed. A BMW swerved to miss them, horn dopplering away. Lights and noise and the end of the world.

They skidded sideways to an icy stop, the bumper kissing a lamppost with just the slightest thump.

Slowly, their hearts relaxed. Her fingers had grabbed the dashboard so hard they felt broken. She could hear him beside her still breathing hard. That they hadn't been hit gave a new definition to miracle. The snow outside continued to fall, impervious.

"We." She started again. "I. … We should see if the car's all right."

"_Forget the damn car!_"

It was like another tailspin. The rage in his voice crashed against her and dopplered away. They sat, not looking at one another, stunned again by the sound and the silence after it. She found her mind sorting memories in a kind of gibberish, trying to think of a time he had ever yelled at her.

He backed up and drove home.

And when he blocked her at his apartment door, mumbling something about being tired, it was as though the crash she'd held her breath against ever since they spun out had finally reached them. In desperation she pushed past him, ignoring his vexed look, watched him hang his coat half off the sofa and pour himself a scotch. "I'm going straight to bed," he told her.

"You're having a drink. So you can take the time to tell me what you're mad about."

"We can talk in the morning."

From across the street the winking red bar sign she always hated made the apartment garish. He switched on the end-table lamp and she saw the same stunned look he had worn when she danced with Chase, the pretense of indifference. His face frightened her.

"Is this about Georg?" Silence. "Are you mad because I danced with him? Because he spoke German to me?"

"Noooo." Placating (my, wasn't she silly?). "I'm not mad because Gay-Org spoke German to you." His hand clutching his drink on the desk jerked, scotch sloshing out, and he moved the glass back and forth in the spill. "I'm mad –" he turned, his voice huge, "- because he's _fucking_ _your cunt_!"

Crash. She hadn't braced for that one, hadn't even seen it coming. Forgotten her seatbelt. "_No._" He turned away. "I'm not sleeping with Georg. Oh _god_, Greg, no."

It was almost a relief. That astuteness of his had sensed something between them and homed in on it. Assumed the wrong thing (for how long?) and had been devastated by it. All she had to do was clear it up.

"I'm not sleeping with anyone but you, Greg."

"Don't lie. I get enough of that at work."

The pain was like an aura around him. He was crooked again though he stood ramrod straight, as bent as the first time she'd seen him, the unkinking that had seemed to expand him the last few months all gone in an instant. She wanted to touch him and didn't dare.

All she had to do was clear it up.

"I…I should have told you this. Georg and I were a couple a year ago. It lasted all of six weeks. I broke it off. You're…you're just picking up the vibes of that, but there's nothing there."

"I saw you in the bedroom."

_The open door._ A tingle crept across her forehead.

"So Georg hits on me every now and then. He's still in denial about it all. I can't help that –"

His voice was deathly calm. "I saw your face."

(_something red and hot plowing across her chest, her throat, an iron taste in her mouth, despair_)

The thought of him there at the door, watching her presumed tryst with Georg, watching her face glow with emotion while his world crumbled, left her numb, one part of her mind rummaging for an answer, wanting to cry out, _But I was telling him about you!,_ the other part simply shutting down, the thought that she might have _felt what he had felt _so bizarre that she blocked it from her mind as though it had never happened.

He was studying his drink. "Look." His anger seemed to have dissipated. They might have been discussing minor surgery and it made his next words all the more inconceivable. "I'm a coward. I can't take pain. That's been proven and we all know it. This – if I have to be unsure of you all the time, never knowing where I stand… Well, I just couldn't take it. Would rather not take it. It's like a kind of arrhythmia, Dani. Too hard on the…" He bit back the word. "So I'd rather you just leave. Be easier for everyone."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, just - go away and don't come back." She stood frozen, unbelieving. "Go on, go to him."

And here was the extent of the crash, worse than anyone had thought, mangled bodies, sirens all dying at once. His matter-of-factness, he was a doctor, after all, triage his thing. Then the answer burst from her. "I get it! This is one of your tests, isn't it! If I walk out, I fail, or – or what? You can't want to end this just because of a wrong assumption about Georg. It's all just a test - right?"

He made a sound like a public alarm system. "Beeep. This is not a test." Then grew serious again. He sounded tired. Only the glass moved, back and forth, smearing the spill. "Don't make it harder than it is. I need to watch out for myself, Dani. I need to survive. And I can't do that if I have to go through this all the time. Yeah, it'll hurt and I'll be lonely. But it will be easier in the long run. I'm not a strong person. Just do me the favor, will you, and get out."

She was breathing hard, the end of a dance gone terribly wrong, no one clapping. When she took a step toward him he leaned away into the desk, chin jutting as though to ward her off.

"No," she told him. "I don't believe you. I'm not leaving. I refuse." She sounded hysterical even to herself.

And something in his eyes hardened. "Come on, don't pretend it would matter to you." They might have been blue marbles. "You think I don't know what this is, Dani? What it's always been?" Whatever he was building to frightened her. She shook her head uselessly. "You're some kind of wound freak." The words fell inside her, meaningless. "Really get off on the crippled guy, don't you? Don't give me that face. I've known it ever since the first night. You had to force yourself not to look at the leg until I gave you permission. Someone like you doesn't go for someone like me out of the blue. I should be so lucky. The hottest you ever get is when I'm in pain. And Chase, boy, he hit a nerve, didn't he? You had to leave him standing in the hall before he could see it in your face."

_You make it all about your leg._ "Have you gone insane?" she whispered. Her throat felt caught in a vise. She held a hand at her neck, her own heartbeat small and cold.

"You've been screwing the leg the whole time and we both know it. So don't act like you'd be giving up a lot."

"For God's sake, Greg, you can't really think this –"

"And don't worry, I've seen it before. Don't quite get the turn-on, but I assume it's all about the pity and some twisted need to be superior. That's you, isn't it? Miss Physically – Perfect." Little words were coming out of her, _no_ and _stop_. He ignored them. "Cameron had it too, except for her it was the psychological limp instead of the real one. I was broken and she was going to fix me. For you it's just the limp." His eyes were glittering with the release of some long-held tension. He motioned with his cane. "You know, I should have fucked you with this, you'd have gotten more out of it."

He might as well have hit her. She gasped, air all gone, one arm clutched around her stomach.

"Point being, I can do without your…ministrations. Go to any hospital and attach yourself to some war veteran. An amputee maybe. Just leave me alone."

And now she was crying, hating herself for it, for having to wipe her face with her palms and sleeves while he watched her with narrowed eyes. Everything lay numb inside, this was it now, the end of the crash, life draining away. Either he meant it or it was the pain lashing out. Either there was something she could say or there was nothing. She felt paralyzed. She wished he would really hit her, anything rather than spout this insanity. The fact that he could say it, whether he believed it or not, hurt worse than any fist.

She found enough voice to speak. "You really are crippled, aren't you?" His hand tightened on his cane. "You're crippled in your mind. I don't know why I didn't see it a long time ago."

They stood that way for awhile, statues, and then he said: "What part of 'get out' did you not understand?"

The don't-come-back part, she wanted to cry. He couldn't have meant that part, and when she looked up she saw that he had. He wanted her gone, because it was easier for him. He was in pain and the treatment was to toss her out. It didn't matter if it was the right treatment. We'll try this, his stony eyes told her, if it kills us both, we'll know I was wrong.

One last breath. "Greg, please don't do this."

"_Go._"

She turned and stumbled out. Backpack, keys. Her apartment was cold. She tried to hang her coat and missed the hook because a coat of his that he'd forgotten hung there and it was all too much, so heavy, as though she embraced all that was him, an armful she would have to dump at his door, coat and key and the CD of Steve Howe, a necklace, but she was sobbing by then. It wasn't the things at all.

It was the story. She had always cried – not sobbing like this, the shuddering wheezing wails, rocking back and forth on the sofa – just little-girl tears leaking out at the darkest point in the movie and her father had always told her (his strong voice wrapping her now): if you think you know at the start of something how it will end, then you're either very smart or very foolish. She couldn't have imagined this end. It was no end, too abrupt, a blank screen. Trying to push it into the next day, the next week or month, was unbearable. Would they pass each other in the hall as if they'd never known each other?

Would he look at her?

She had lost out to the pills.

It was her one certainty – that they were at fault. She had always seen it when he couldn't, the addiction siphoning off his natural strength, making him react insanely to things. She had argued with him about it before, cajoled and pleaded in the face of his stubbornness, god they hadn't spoken for a full day once. Never demanded. Maybe she should have.

Too late.

Every new thought shook her, until there was nothing left to cry. Quiet descended. She became aware of a sound. For a moment she took it to be her own hiccupping heart, but it was far too slow. A thump, and half a minute later, another.

When she heard the faint moan, she rushed to the wall, appalled at her own trembling, and put her ear close to listen.

The next thump was loud, sustained. Objects falling. The cry was pain.

Thoughtless – beyond thought – she ran, scrabbling for his key, and burst into his apartment. At first she didn't see him. The light was crazy. The glass of scotch had shattered on the floor. Another groan. He was lying behind the sofa flat on his face, but by the time she reached him - screaming "What are you doing?" - he was on his knees, then he was standing. He looked wild: cold and sweating, face clenched.

"I'm walking, dammit!"

"_What?_"

As she watched in horror, he placed all his weight on his bad leg and it simply crumpled as though it were paper, pitching him to the floor again while he cried out in pain. He fell headlong, like an uncoordinated child not even putting his hands out to catch himself. She tried to think how many times he'd done it already, how many thumps she'd heard. He was already getting up again.

"_Stop!_"

"Get out! I told you to leave me alone!"

"I'm not gonna let you do this -"

"I never want to see your stupid face again!" The next attempt knocked a stack of journals over. She was sobbing again. In a cold frenzy she remembered he'd taken none of the pills that evening. The pain had to be hideous.

The next try threw him against the lamp and it crashed to the floor. Shards of bulb and china strewed the space in front of him. When he hauled himself to his feet, eyes focused on nothing, she knew all of a sudden what she was seeing – an animal in a trap, and like an animal, she realized, he wasn't going to stop; the panic reached her throat and she started screaming, "Nein, _nein, nein_ –" but the animal wasn't listening. She dropped to her knees and began frantically brushing the broken fragments aside, crying "Wait, you'll cut yourself!" - trying to clear a space even as he stepped into it.

And for half a second he stood, poised on his right leg, face manic with glee, and then fell, no sound this time, just air exploding from his lips, his face so white she thought the pain must have broken him at last, but he was already dragging himself into a sitting position against the piano leg, readying himself to stand.

She crawled on top of him.

For a moment he seemed almost strong enough to lift himself in spite of her weight, heaving upward as her legs tightened around his waist, but the pain had weakened him. He tried to throw her off sideways then, thrusting at her, both yelling, though hers were sobs. In the din she could hear only herself: "You're _mine_, you belong to me! I'm not gonna let you break yourself –"

One flailing arm caught her hard on the side of the head. She hardly noticed. It might have been a caress.

And yet – stunned silence. His face seemed to melt – shock at himself. "_No._" As if coming back to consciousness he saw what he had done. "No no no –" He touched her head, "I'm _sorry_ –" then he was hugging her, or they were hugging each other, rocking, his arms so hard they crushed the breath from her.

Later she would recall it as not being his voice at all – the plea, a low moan, as though a stranger crouched behind her and did the whispering, or some small imprisoned person inside him, a child through a keyhole, words that almost didn't register, faint as the wind, as they sat there rocking:

"Help me..."

It poured out of her. They would get him off the pills, it was what was messing with his head making him crazy insane to think she could want another man not Georg not anyone else and they would do it together if they had a plan a slow reduction get Wilson to help before the addiction tore them apart it would all work and everything would be different – his lips on hers stopped her. He was nodding, murmuring Yes to it all, still rocking her, stroking her hair, and when he opened his eyes she saw that he didn't believe it for a second.

Much later she slid off him, extricating herself from his crushing arms. He stood, shakily, and sank onto the piano bench. She sat beside him, both with their hands nerveless in their laps, no impulse left for motion. He wasn't looking at her. Ashamed, she realized. He took the bottle of Vicodin from his jacket pocket, rattled it, and set it on the piano. "I'll say this one time," he told her. "This is not about – _that_." He indicated the bottle. We'll…try what you said. But I'm not kicking it. Not you, not anyone, is going to cure me. You believing _you_ can will just…kill everything we have. When I'm not able to get off the stuff, you'll start to hate yourself. You'll tell yourself you weren't enough to be the one to finally do it for me and you'll ask yourself why. It'll be like a constant infusion of poison – doesn't he love me enough, what am I doing wrong –"

"I'm not an idiot."

"You could be Einstein and fall into that kind of trap. I just want to hear you say it: it's not going to work."

"It's not going to work. Now I want to hear you say you believe me about Georg."

He sighed and stared away a long time. "A year ago, huh?" She waited. After a moment he nodded. It was the most non-committal nod she could imagine. The other thought – _Say you don't believe the things you said _– she couldn't bring herself to speak.

"The pain is real." She realized he meant his leg. "No one believes that. Maybe the pills do change my personality. But everyone telling me how I should quit the stuff just shouts out: Hey, we want you to suffer like hell - a little torture never hurt anyone."

"No!" He finally looked at her. "Do you think I want you to go through that?" She hadn't thought she had more tears, but they were starting again. "If I could take your pain on me, Greg, I would, this very second." It was a child's prayer, simplistic and yet utterly sincere.

"No, you _wouldn't_. Don't say that. Oh, you might, for an hour or a day, but then you'd come crawling, _begging _to give it back." His fist came down on the piano keys. "Anyone would."

"Then I'd take half of it!" So childish he burst out laughing, a half-sob.

"Oh, _right_. Or maybe one-third. How about 22 percent?" He laid his forehead on the keys with a discordant bang, the laugh scaling to a moan. "Oh, god, I think I'm in love with you."

And then, watching him later as he bagged his hidden stashes to be turned over to Wilson (the sheer number of them daunting, two bottles inside the piano alone, which might have been comical if it weren't sad), she thought about how substantial the white pills seemed, rocks like immovable worlds in the cup of his hand that still shook, always growing denser while he seemed to her, in that moment, so insubstantial. If he were sand he would be trickling through her fingers now. She would have to hold him, hold him together just as hard as she could. It was the start of a new year, and she was strong.

"Hi, Dani. Why the phone call?"

"I need your help. You know Greg's trying to get off the Vicodin. He – uh -has told you, hasn't he? He was supposed to."

"First I've heard of it. Since when?"

"Well, since – big fight. Native revolt, two suns ago. Squaw almost burn white man at stake."

"I see. Kudos to you. No one else could even get him to try."

"Hold your kudos till we see if it works."

"I find myself holding my kudos a lot when it comes to him."

"I hope not in front of your patients."

A chuckle. "Bad timing though. Now that Stacy's moving back here."

A long pause. "First I've heard of it."

"She and her husband are separating. Not that you need to worry, Dani, competition-wise. It's just that – well, if she contacts him at all, it'll probably depress the hell out of him. Dredging up the past, that kind of thing. Make it harder to kick the addiction. So what can I do?"

"Spy on him for me, James. Make sure he doesn't take more than he says."

"More kudos. My hat is off, as I perceive you do not trust him on this."

"Not any farther than I could throw his piano." _But then I know how his leg hurts. Because I've felt it._

For one second.

……………………………………………………………………………….

End of Chapter 3

Lyrics by Evanescence, _Bring Me to Life_; Frankie Goes to Hollywood, _The Power of Love_.

Any medical idiocies are mine. Thanks for reading.


	4. Hidden and Found

(_Watching him let his ex-girlfriend back into his life was like finding a lump where one shouldn't have been, scared it might be malignant.)_

CHAPTER 4 (_Hidden and Found_)

"You haven't told me much, Greg."

"I thought I'd said a lot."

The man seated across from him was bald and a pen-nibbler. His voice was irritating, if not fingernails on a chalkboard then at least squeaky chalk." You've told me a wealth of detail about Dani, Greg –"

The office was shabby-chic, the green leather armchairs they both sat in worn enough to suggest they might pop a spring any second. Their water glasses rested on chipped Mexican tiles. " - I know she does her morning yoga in the nude and that she has a sister she speaks German to. Hell, Greg, I even know she never wears a bra." Little chuckle, meant to put him at ease. Like the shabby furnishings: my, aren't we on an intimate basis. No need for pretense between _us,_ is there, Greg?

If the bastard called him Greg again he would get up and leave.

Outside, morning traffic sounded far away. Sun seeped through the windows. There had to be something else he could be doing on a nice day. He tried to remember why he'd stooped to consulting a shrink.

The windows bothered him. Something about them.

"What I don't know is how you _feel_. Your feelings about this Dani."

_Feelings_. God, the guy was trite. He sighed. "Feelings are a marketing ploy. They're given pretty names, wrapped up in a Hollywood movie and sold to suckers who want to _express_ themselves." Baldie was frowning at him. "I'll never know what you feel, and you'll _really_ never know what I feel. Thinking you have a word that sums it up – love, grief, happiness - just makes it more complicated." He shifted. His leg hurt. "Look, this isn't working out, Dr.- " (he had to check the nametag) "- Klein. I'm – uh – going to hit the road. Or at least pound it with my…" He rose and looked for his cane, which seemed to have disappeared.

"You really don't remember, do you?"

He stood very still. His leg _throbbed_.

"You can't leave here, Greg."

The windows. "What's that supposed to mean, you ass."

"Sit down. I'm going to explain this one more time –"

"No."

"Listen carefully. You've been here for months. It's called dissociation –"

"Are you insane?" He should have picked up on it, the barred windows, how could he have missed that, no shrink you consult privately wears a white coat and a nametag. It was some elaborate joke, Wilson most likely. Dammit, he'd make him pay. How had he got here? Memory not working, so Wilson had – _what_? - drugged him? Mr. Ethical?

Work it out later. Just leave. Two doors and he chose the left, it was closest, forget finding his cane, he could hobble fast if it weren't for the - _stare_ - plastic sandals he was wearing, thin pants like scrubs, Wilson had gone all out –

The door was locked.

"Face it, you're not going anywhere," said Dr. Klein.

"I'm_ out of here._ Tell Wilson '_Ping!_ Game Over.' Tell him to watch his back." He rattled the door again then pounded his palm on it. "I'm leaving." The last a whisper, as if only for himself. Across the room the other door opened. More white coats, the men inside them big and tattooed. Someone had begun to yell, tortured, the sound inhuman.

When they had him on the floor (cane would have been handy, but he got a punch or two in), Dr. Klein straddled his chest and flourished a syringe. His face held pity. "Listen to me, Dr. House -" (why back to formal, his bruised mind wanted to scream, now that we're so intimate you're sitting on me) "- this is important. _Dani doesn't exist_. You made her up –"

"_Nooo!_"

"- you couldn't deal with your problems anymore, so you invented the perfect woman for yourself, one who stays loyal to you no matter what you do, and of course she does because she's only in your head – "

He bucked so hard he might have thrown them off, but the needle was already sliding into his arm, seeking a place among the punctures there from a hundred other times –

He woke.

She'd left the lamp on in the bathroom again and a slant of light fell on her face beside him in the bed. When he touched her cheek she _hmmm_ed and drew closer, with the half-smile of someone who doesn't have to come fully awake to know who's beside her.

He couldn't get back to sleep.

Cutting back on the Vicodin this time was giving him truly amazing nightmares. Didn't take Freud coming back from the grave to tell him what that last one meant. That his subconscious still couldn't accept the fact that a woman like Dani Sieger would love him. Couldn't even say his conscious mind accepted it. It had seemed eager enough to assume the worst – eager and devastated – when he'd heard their voices at Gay-Org's, peered through the crack in the bedroom door and seen her gazing up at his rival with that expression of utter worship, her hands on Ponytail's arms, the soft murmur of their German. His stomach had clenched, something red and hot plowing across his chest, the loss so stunning it brought tears to his eyes, but at least it had meant an end to the uncertainty, he could crawl back to his hole, forget she ever happened. When he heard people coming down the hall, he'd flung himself through the nearest door to hide, wanting to kick himself when he realized he'd walked into a _closet_ for chrissake, and had stood there smothered in coats, smelling someone's (Gay-Org's?) old sneakers, while a part of his soul died. Found his way to the kitchen fast and launched himself into a conversation so she would think he'd been there awhile.

He got up quietly so as not to wake her, unhooked the fireplace brush in the living room and laid it beside him on the sofa. The pills were still there, his emergency ration of two, in the tiny baggie taped up deep inside the bristles. His official bottle stood on the desk, but though she said she was leaving it up to him, he suspected she checked it every night. He knew Wilson had the mandate to watch him at work and he'd preempted the good doctor by announcing to all and sundry (the ducklings and Cuddy) that he was cutting back for Dani's sake and would appreciate their help. It meant they would keep him in their sights, which was the point. Misdirection. A basic ruse in magic. Keep your eyes on this bottle in my hand. Freed him up to partake of his hidden stashes as needed.

The two pills gleamed in the lamplight. Did he need them? He'd accepted Dani's explanations about Georg. He had to assume there was something wrong with the German, something no one could see that made her not prefer him. Maybe the guy had the world's worst case of back acne. Probably ate pickled garlic in bed. But there was more. A patient had died the week before, their diagnosis coming an hour too late, and within another hour his leg had just exploded, like molten lava coursing through his thigh. If his pain really was a conversion disorder, then not the way Wilson thought. He had actually been reducing before that, defying his own expectations, down to 60 mg daily from his (literal) high of 80, but that day he'd gone at his office stash so hard, like a rabid dog, that he'd had to call Dani and tell her he was working late because she would have seen it in his eyes. If he took these two now it would put him just over 80 a day for the past week, no ground gained at all.

He was putting them back in the baggie when the phone rang.

"Can I speak to Dani?"

He let his shock carry him. Why'd the guy have his number? "Well, good morning, Gay-Org. Wake up and smell your morning breath – _it's 5 a.m_. Maybe the crack of dawn is the climax of your day, all puns intended, but–"

"Just let me talk to her. It's important."

She was already at the bedroom door, yawning. "What is it?"

"The sound of jackboots in the morning. The perfect wake-up call."

She hadn't seen the fireplace brush and while she listened to Georg with her back to the room, her murmured replies in German sounding more and more upset, he got rid of the evidence, slipping the brush under the sofa and the pills between the cushions.

When she hung up she was crying. "Martha Renfro died of a heart attack last night," she told him.

Hed put that out of his mind. They sat in the kitchen and she lapsed into memories of her mentor while she cried quietly, anecdotes, one story standing out for him, some put-down of Georg that had been applauded by the whole ensemble and that made him think he might have liked the woman if he'd known her, and then they grew silent.

"Death bats last," he murmured. He realized it sounded crass, but she seemed to see in his eyes what he felt, that he was trying to help her through it. She crawled into his lap, his tiny dancer, as she did so often, and he held her, the small pressure of her bottom as always making his thigh hurt worse (and he would die before he ever let her know that).

When she went to shower, he retrieved the pills from the sofa, rolled them like jewels between his fingertips, and swallowed them both. To hell with Wilson's conversion disorder.

_La belle indifference_.

…………………………………………………………………………….

It was always courting disaster to go shopping with a man, she knew, but she couldn't have known what would happen. Some things you can't foresee.

While she had tried on clothes Greg had parked himself on the bench beside the dressing room mirror and started a free consulting service: women not put off by his rude comments began to realize they were true and sought his opinion, occasionally of no help - ("Does this make me look fat?" "No, your body does") – but usually hitting the mark ("Why knee-length? You've got great legs – show them.") They stopped off at the perfume counter after he badgered the name of her scent out of her and told her he was buying her some, and when she turned back after wandering down the aisle, he was talking to a dark-haired woman in a tailored suit, someone from the hospital, she assumed, who liked to stand _very_ close and who studied Greg's face like it was the menu at the best restaurant in town. As she approached, it hit her. This is it, she thought.

Then he was turning to her, his hand against her back. "Dani, I'd… like you to meet Stacy."

Simple, with his hand there to support her. "It's nice to finally meet you," she said. "I've heard so much about you."

The woman smiled. A warm, sophisticated smile that said major bitch. "It's nice to meet you too, Dani. I've never heard of you before."

_Stay cool_. "Oh, why should you have?" She nudged closer to Greg. "Unless the two of you are carrying on some steamy e-mail romance I don't know about."

He gave a fake sigh. "You caught us. We're texting."

"That would be for the quickies."

The woman was watching them, the way they interacted. Summing her up. The barely perceptible glance at her jeans and faded blouse. A lawyer, she remembered. She stood straighter.

And the conversation was an interrogation. She was in the witness stand. How long had she known the defendant Greg? State your occupation. At her "Professional dancer," the eyes went from stand-by bitch to full display mode. Greg said, "Not the euphemistic kind," at the same time she did and they smiled at each other. And when the attorney requested to move the trial to dinner one evening (his hand tightening on her back), she was able to state in all honesty that she had performances for the next two weeks.

Another smile let her know she was outgunned.

"Oh, I meant Greg and I. We do need to catch up. Greg, I'll call you. Your number hasn't changed, I take it?"

After Stacy left he almost forgot the perfume on the counter behind him and then stumped off so fast (in the opposite direction from Stacy) she had to take a running step to catch up. He only seemed to come out of his thoughts when the aisle dead-ended at the back of the store. "The door's the other way," she told him. He seemed startled to see her there. His eyes wouldn't meet hers.

In the evening he barricaded himself with a beer in front of the TV. She put it off for half an hour before clicking the TV off. "I'd like to talk to you." He looked like he'd been expecting it. "I'd like you to say no when Stacy calls."

"We're at that stage now, are we? You tell me what you want and I do it. Also known as the mistress and slave stage. The ventriloquist, performing live tonight with her dummy."

She perched on the sofa beside him. "Just answer one question honestly." The question was so hard she felt unfirm inside, quaky because she didn't want to know the answer. "Why do you keep a photo of you and Stacy in your wallet?"

She had found the photo one day when he yelled from another room for her to check his lottery ticket as the numbers came up. The photo had been in a back compartment (hidden?), well-worn from much handling, two in-love faces in their prime smiling into the camera, heads touching softly. Younger, which was why she hadn't recognized Stacy at first in the department store. His smile as natural as the sun, full of confidence. A different person.

She had put it back quietly, but he'd seen something in her face when she returned (his antenna was just too good) and she pretended it was all about the condom that had also – surprisingly - been in his wallet, letting him swear up and down that it was a relic from his pre-her era he'd forgotten to toss, until he seemed almost flattered at her jealousy. Pretending to forgive him while all she could think of was the photo. To know that his ex was more prevalent in his head than she had ever suspected was devastating. In one moment Stacy had become not just a name, but a ghostly presence beside them, the question of how much he was still hung up on her popping up in the happiest moments. Was she in bed with them when they did it? When they watched Jay together late at night did he forget whose lap his head lay on, whose fingers stroked his hair?

She waited now for an answer. He was silent. "Do you take the photo out and look at it?"

"Yes."

"And why?"

A sigh. "Because it was the last time I was really happy."

"Oh, thank you," she managed to force out. "Thank you so much for sharing that with me."

"I didn't mean it like that. It has nothing to do with you _or_ Stacy. I…look at my own face on it. And no, I'm not that big-headed. I'm looking at …that person I was. Before the infarction."

It lay there between them for a moment, like a wall.

"So you're a different you now, but it's the one I'm with, Greg. You know I rarely demand anything of you –"

"She's not going to call anyway."

The phone rang.

The way they both jumped might have been funny any other time. "It's the hospital," he assured her. He went to pick it up and his narrowed eyes and quick glance away told her otherwise. When he took his murmured replies into the kitchen where she couldn't hear, she felt numb with shock. _I'm here_, she wanted to scream at him. _I exist_.

"So you're going out with her?" He'd come back in and put the phone away.

"Tomorrow night. It's dinner, for chrissake. We'll be eating. Knives and forks. No other tools will come into play, and I wish you'd stop this –"

She got up as he spoke, ignoring his look, and went to her apartment to make a few calls. When she returned, he was outside on the balcony that led off from the kitchen. The late February air took her breath away. She didn't know how he could stand there in his shirtsleeves.

"I just called Georg."

"Don't tell me, we're going to double-date."

"He's giving me a week off. I've got a cover who can dance my parts. I'm flying home to Pittsburgh to spend some time with Mom. You – go on out with Stacy. I just don't want to be here when you do."

His mouth fell open. "You're _bolting_." She shrugged. "You can't handle having finally met Stacy and so you're _running away_. Dani, that's just stupid."

His approval had come to mean so much that his real disapproval (not the flippant sarcastic kind) made her cringe. It was the photo, she wanted to tell him, but she knew it was more than that. Stacy – the idea of Stacy – made her feel inadequate: that they had shared a world together before she ever knew Greg existed, that Stacy fit him better, from an outside view at least – age, education and something she could only think of as worldliness, a sophisticated _sheen_ that had left her feeling like a lump of clay in the department store. All-natural jeans girl, devoting her life to dance while they moved in other realms. She knew why he said _That's_ _stupid_, and not _You're stupid_ to her, always careful never to bring up the issue of brains, where she was no match for him. The closest they had come was a discussion of EQ, in which he had admitted hers was in the stratosphere, but claimed his was high too, something to do with seeing through people ("You do know that EQ doesn't stand for Ego Quotient, don't you?" she had asked him).

He was ranting now. "I can't believe you're being so irrational – so thickheaded. It's weak, it's childish–"

"Moronic, feminine, idiotic. I'll buy you a thesaurus so you can come up with some new ones."

It stopped him. "Okay, look." He seemed to struggle for a moment. "I've – been duly chastised. I'll call Stacy back and cancel."

She was already shaking her head. "I wanted to know you could do something for me you didn't want to do, like say no to her in the first place. Without me putting the thumbscrews on you. To just sacrifice something, Greg." Was it time to tell him? "I know you're lying about how much Vicodin you take." His face closed up. "Which wouldn't matter, the point being that you made the effort, but you could have told me it wasn't working. Rather than chow down on what I presume are hidden stashes. At the risk of sounding like Rodney Dangerfield, that – doesn't show much respect for me." She turned to leave.

"Dani." She looked back. Behind him sounds rose from the street below, people going about their business, their steps muffled by winter. For a moment she thought he wouldn't speak. "You make me happy."

It was the closest he had ever come - probably the closest he could get at that stage – to the three words. "You make me happy too," she replied. "And frustrated, and confused, and furious. Depending, I guess, on the constellation of the planets on a given day or, more likely, the constellation of your clinic patients." She shrugged. "You're hard to get along with, Greg. I – just need a break from that. So see you in a week."

And if she was running - her thoughts whirling as she sat in the airport the next morning - it was not just from the photo. It was from his hand at her back, the way it had fumbled with her blouse unconsciously while they stood before Stacy, his fist bunching the cloth there into a hard knot until she had feared the buttons in front would pop off. Because she had seen him upset in situations before. Angry, ill at ease.

But never nervous.

……………………………………………………………………………

"Are you _nuts_?"

"You're as bad as Dani. It's dinner, not sex. As in eating. Tongues involved minimally."

"Stacy of all things! Serves you right that Dani left for a week. You – you –" He was stuttering again as he did so often with House, always shocked at how stupid someone so brilliant could be. House's office was cold, as was the burrito lunch he hadn't touched. If the guy wasn't eating, it was a sure sign he was more upset than he let on.

"You'd - just better watch yourself with Stacy tonight." House grimaced at him. "Maybe you don't realize what you've got in Dani. Pick anyone here-" Wilson made a show of gesturing back at the hall behind the glass. "Ask them what they think she sees in you. Did you know the staff's had a running bet ever since the Christmas party? Half the hospital thinks you pay her to be your girlfriend – and believe me, I didn't start that one. The other half figures she's into something so weird she can't find anyone else to do it with her."

"Cool. Any bets on what our specific perversion might be?"

"No. But if you'd give me a hint, I could start the rumor and really clean up."

"Oh, say whatever you like. I'll back you up."

_Always the joker_. "The point is, you don't give someone like that an excuse to pack it in."

House didn't seem to be listening, the quarter he was walking across the back of his knuckles evidently more interesting. Finally he said, "I'm seeing Stacy tonight. That's all there is to it. On Friday…I'm flying to Pittsburgh."

He saw the shadows in his friend's eyes. "Really?"

"Yeah, isn't it romantic?" He stopped walking the coin and turned away to gaze out the window. "I'm going after her."

……………………………………………………………………………

The man at the door could only be described as rumpled. Grizzled, her first thought, yet the features behind the unshaven chin were clean in their intensity, the eyes reserved. "Mrs. Sieger?"

The cane would have told her. "You're Greg."

"I should have called, but - well, Dani's been doing this bolting thing lately. Didn't want to spook her."

"Dani's not here." She should have told him the truth, but she had a feeling he would have whistled back the taxi just pulling away and she wanted to get to know him. "Why don't you come in?"

In the kitchen she made him coffee, watched his intensity take in the house - and her - while he talked about the flight, how security always assumed he had a bomb in his cane or else why would they x-ray it and didn't being crippled count for anything anymore. "Sorry, I'm rambling."

She sat opposite him. "You know, you're different than I expected."

"I get that a lot."

"Actually, it's been - " she checked her watch - "ten minutes and I expected to have been insulted six different ways by now."

He smiled. "Ah, you've been talking to Kerstin."

Her other daughter had been highly unimpressed with her sister's boyfriend when she first met him, something to do with an ugly argument about whether her son needed the Ritalin she'd been prescribed for him.

"I believe 'pig-headed' was the mildest term Kerstin used to describe you," she told him. "She and Dani were at each other's throats for a while."

"But she didn't give Kevin the Ritalin, did she?"

She laughed and shook her head. "You were obviously very persuasive."

In fact, the picture her older daughter had painted of Dani's boyfriend – of an embittered pill-popper congenitally incapable of deferring to anyone else's opinion on anything – was not the man who sat across from her. He was courteous, intent on all she had to say. They sat for almost an hour, while the sun poured through the window and he consumed more coffee than she drank in a week. He told her things she hadn't known about how he and Dani met, then muttered, "Oops," when she showed surprise.

"My daughter did that?"

"No – I made it all up." They were both grinning. "No, really. Don't worry, Mom - she's still the little girl with the Barbie ballerina quilt upstairs."

"Now how did you know about that?"

He shrugged and smiled.

She showed him photos. He skimmed Dani's childhood, only showing interest in her teenage years when she began to look like the woman she would become. He stared a long time at pictures of her father, and then asked how he had died. A stroke, she informed him. At fifty-two.

"That's young. Diabetic?" She shook her head. "Not obese…" He studied the photos of her dead husband for minutes, paging back and forth, oblivious to her, and she caught a glimpse of the doctor in him, the fervency Dani was always talking about.

"The girls were crazy about him," she told him. "Kerstin had her own life by then but Dani was only fifteen and she took it hard. It was a bad time for her."

"So she got along well with him?"

It was a strange question, and when he glanced up he saw her frown. "Sorry," he said. "I - guess I was extrapolating from my own childhood."

"Not great?"

He turned another page as though she hadn't spoken.

When he finally closed the album he had been there an hour and a half, and she felt she'd known him for years - and that she didn't know him at all. She had a strong suspicion that people who'd really known him for years felt the same way.

"So –" He leaned back and twirled his cane, suddenly antsy. "When is Dani getting back?"

"I should have told you this. She's – um – not coming back." The shocked look on his face made her realize how it sounded. "I mean, not this week. She only stayed here a day and then she flew to Arizona to visit friends. Actually, she thought you might show up here and she wanted to be gone when you did."

His disappointment was so palpable she wanted to reach out and touch his arm. She watched in amazement as he took a small bottle from his pocket and dry-swallowed a pill the size of Delaware.

"Friends – or a friend?" he asked.

"A married couple she's known since college." The question surprised her. Dani had told her he was insecure that way but it hadn't fit the man across from her, with his easy slouch that still left him looking tall and the quiet voice that dominated her kitchen with every word. "You…" He looked up. She wasn't sure how to start. "You know, I don't think you need to worry about Dani – about what she feels for you." He was very still. "She's crazy about you. She talks about you all the time. We get so tired of hearing how wonderful you are, we have to tell her to shut up."

"I have to tell women that all the time."

"Your work, your wit. Your strength of character."

He raised one skeptical eyebrow, and glanced back over his shoulder as though wondering who she was talking about, but she could see he was drinking it up, like someone dying of thirst.

"You should have been here that time after Kerstin met you, when she was trying to convince Dani that she had no future with you –"

"Believe me, I would love to have been. I assume age played a large part in the discussion."

"It was part of it."

He was nodding. "That's why I've decided to be thirty when she gets back. Ought to solve everyone's problem with us."

"Actually -" She took a deep breath. "It was the disability. It was cruel of Kerstin but she wasn't pulling any punches." She felt as though she were diving off a cliff. His eyes were like sharp stones. "She was eager to point out all the things you will never do with Dani because of your leg. For instance – and I have to say, realistically – that you are never going to jet off to Cozumel with her for the beaches, like her boyfriend before last did." She tried to gauge how he was taking it, her voice soft. "That you're never going to run alongside a son teaching him to ride a bike." Suddenly she hated herself for having brought it up. "That you're never going to dance with her."

"Ah, define dancing."

She stopped herself from staring. "That's exactly what Dani said."

So they thought alike. She had a sudden image of the two of them together, her little girl whose head would just come to this man's chest, slowing to match his pace as they climbed steps outside some user-unfriendly building. Happy to wait for him. She couldn't remember whether Dani had described something like that. "She's very much in love with you," she told him. The sun scudding in and out of clouds beyond the window bathed the kitchen in changing hues and tinged his eyes light then dark. Completely unfathomable. "She was upset about this ex-girlfriend thing. Please don't break her heart."

"Me? Break _her_ heart?" His chuckle was pained. "Okay, Mom. I won't."

…………………………………………………………………………….

When she saw him come around the corner she let out the breath she'd been holding. "James."

"Sorry I'm late."

She'd taken the back elevator as he'd told her. She'd never been as high as the fifth floor. She saw the nurse at the far end of the hall glance their way. "Does Greg suspect anything?" she asked him. He was shaking his head. "Did he see you leave your office?"

"Dani, I leave my office ten times a day. And you're still officially out of town till tomorrow. What's to suspect?"

"You know how he is. If you were acting funny at all – "

"Stop worrying." His hand on her arm was gentle. "Come on, there should be an empty room here." The hall was deserted. The nurse had turned away, busy with papers.

And when she left the room afterwards she was so unfocused, her head buzzing with thoughts, that she took the main elevator by mistake, a habit from a hundred lunches with Greg. The doors opened on third and there he stood. His mouth fell open. She wanted to sink into the floor, push the fire alarm, _anything _not to have to talk to him until she was ready. The doors started to close and he stopped them with his cane and stepped in.

He caned the button for the second floor without glancing at her. His mouth was a hard line. "Just in case you were looking for me," he said, "I'm never higher than third." His presence as always was overwhelming. A week away, she thought, and he can do this to you. The bell pinged and when she hesitated he turned in the open door, expecting her to follow. "Come on, we can talk in my office."

He could only assume she was there to see him. She would have to play along. "Which is so very private."

"I can lock the doors." He finally looked straight at her. "Where did you think we would talk here anyway? An operating room? You're the one crawling back a day early." _If you only knew_. She tried to brush past him without a word, but he couldn't let it drop. "Arizona too hot for you?" _Please stop_. She kept walking. "Couldn't stand having sand in your crotch anymore?"

As they entered his office his gaze lingered for half a second on her blouse, her chest, an odd x-ray glance, and then he was turning away. She felt like a deer in headlamps. She could still feel other hands there on her breasts. Things were moving too fast. He finished locking the doors and flopped into his chair. "See? No one will bother us. Look suitably upset and they'll think you're a patient. No, wait - you already do."

She sat across from him. "Can you stop making jokes for one minute?"

His face became serious. "Okay." He took his watch off and placed it where he could see the minute hand. "Go."

She took a mental breath. Another joke and I will leave, she thought. "I didn't come here to talk to you at all."

"No," he said quietly. "You came here because you're pregnant and needed an exam."

She stared. "_What?_"

"You have conducting gel on your blouse, Dani. You've had an ultrasound." He was shrugging, but she could see fear in his eyes. "It happens. The IUD can move around, become unreliable. Or maybe you were just lying about having one."

She was shaking her head. "I came here to see Wilson."

"Oh _no!_" he cried theatrically. "Wilson's the father!"

"Dammit, would you stop it – I'm not pregnant." He had cornered her into the truth and now she would have to tell it. "I've found a lump in my breast," she informed him. "I wanted Wilson to look at it."

His shock filled the office, a hollow silence, as though the air around them had gone to sleep. The bustle from the hall grew distant. His eyes when they finally broke from hers glanced about the room, seeking anything else: folders cluttering his desk, the blank TV screen. Finally he spoke. "Were you – um – planning to tell me about this at all? It's not like I'm a doctor or anything."

She had known it would be that way and yet it still hurt. With a word he had managed to make it about himself. Insulted that she hadn't consulted him first. She felt choked inside. He could be so giving, so _locked_ on her, not only in bed where his passion still astonished her after six months, but in little things that became so intense it was as though they were melting into each other – only to turn it all around with some crappy comment that served his ego. His neediness, when he was the one she needed. It was the reason she hadn't wanted to tell him. She had known – from the moment she'd felt the lump at Bill and Tanya's, calling her mom and hearing that Greg had been there, arranging to fly back early – through it all she had known what it would mean if she were truly sick. That he would make her his case - already was in fact - a referendum on his abilities, when what she needed was for him to take her in his arms. Whatever fear might be tearing her up inside was no concern to him, all the degradation she knew would follow if it really was cancer. None of it would matter to him. She had already had a taste, up on the fifth floor, of what it would be like - the humiliation she had just gone through of having to strip her shirt off and stand there while Wilson kneaded her breasts and told her to lie down for the ultrasound, wondering if it was panic that had made her stupid enough to call her boyfriend's best friend for an exam rather than a stranger. Wilson had been so professional, calming her, explaining how the ultrasound worked, that her respect for him had gone up immensely. Imagining Greg in the same situation left her almost nauseous.

"I found the lump two days ago in Arizona," she told him. If he could be that way, so could she. "When was I supposed to tell you – before or after our big fight about Stacy?"

"Oh, to hell with Stacy." He seemed to mean it. "What did Wilson say?"

She could imagine the frown on his face turning reproachful if she didn't come up with the exact words. She tried to remember. Aside from Wilson's assurances that there were twenty things it could be that weren't cancer, she had been too worried to listen.

"He – um – said it was discrete. That it was hard, but that he could move it around."

"I assume Wilson told you that's a good sign. If he didn't, my opinion of the caring doctor would have to be revised."

"He said he couldn't tell anything. He wants to do some fine thing with a needle."

"Fine needle aspiration."

"I'm supposed to come back in the afternoon when he has time."

He stood up so abruptly she started. She watched as he hobbled out across his terrace, hurdled the partition and banged his cane on Wilson's glass. She could hear nothing of their conversation, but she could follow its course in Wilson's face when he stepped out: surprise that Greg had run into her, defense of their sneaking around. Wilson had patients in his office, an older couple and a teenage girl, who leaned toward the glass to stare. She tried to ignore Greg's gestures, which seemed so manic without the force of his voice to accompany them, a mime acting out browbeating. She concentrated on the objects in his office, all so functional. You are not a thing, she told herself, not the granite mortar-and-pestle there on the sideboard she knew he used to grind pills, not the medical volumes shelved haphazardly. Some decision had been reached; he was turning back toward his office, and she suddenly couldn't stand it anymore. She stood and left.

The elevator was just closing and as she slipped in she saw Greg blow out of the office like a tornado looking for her; Wilson, who had gone back through his own office, was almost running down the hall to stop her. The stairs would have been quicker but it was a kind of panic that drove her, every thought except Greg's frowning face flushed from her mind. When the elevator opened at the bottom, Wilson stood there.

"You must be out of breath," she said.

"You know, for a second he was ready to sprint down the stairs after you himself. As if he'd literally forgotten he couldn't. Yelled at me to go instead." They stood in the busy lobby, buffeted by crowds. "Dani, what's wrong?"

"I – just can't be a case of his. And I'm fast becoming one." She sighed. "I'd rather just go somewhere else to get this checked, okay?"

He watched her for a long moment. "You're strong," he told her. "Somewhere in there you're stronger than he is. Let him go through his usual routine on this. You can take it. And it's the only way he can handle it. Please come back up with me."

Far off an announcement pinged over the PA system, something important in incomprehensible static, and she found herself trying to decipher it as though it could tell her what to do.

"Come on." Wilson was already pushing the elevator button and she realized she had decided. "We'll rein him in together, I promise."

He stood outside in the cold, leaning on the low terrace wall. When he saw her returning with Wilson, he stepped back in.

"_Stop bolting!"_

His voice was so loud even Wilson seemed shocked. Half the hospital must have heard. _You have to let him do this. _She steeled herself for the onslaught, but his next words were gentler.

"It's not like you, Dani, this running away all the time. Don't ever bolt again."

She looked straight at him. "I won't."

"We're doing the biopsy now." He was already in the other room, gathering what he needed. Wilson joined him and shut the door but she could hear their argument, Wilson reminding him that it wasn't just another case, that it was a serious matter for her.

"Oh, and I thought I'd get at least a comedy sketch for the next Christmas party out of it," she heard Greg say.

"I just mean, there's no room for your tremendous ego in this. She's scared-"

"And the quicker we can find out it's nothing, the better for her. Get rid of your patient. We're doing the FNA now."

Then they were back on fifth, the same room with its humming ultrasound, and she was topless again on the table, exposed in a way that made her want to cringe, a slab of lean meat, only it was Greg who held the ultrasound probe, his quick "Which side?" directed at Wilson instead of her. She could feel Greg go still as the image came up on the screen. He murmured, "That's large," his voice odd as though he'd burned his tongue. Wilson came into view on the other side, with the longest needle she had ever seen.

"Don't I get an anesthetic?" She sounded scared even to herself.

"It would just mean another needle," said Wilson. "This is quick and painless, Dani."

"I used to hyperventilate when I got shots as a kid."

"Just relax." Wilson turned to concentrate on the screen, the needle hovering near her chest.

Greg still hadn't looked at her.

They spoke over her (_ignore me_, she thought, _I'm just a body_).

"Looks lucent." (Greg). "Lipid cyst maybe."

"Pretty solid for that."

"Spiculated. There." Greg pointed to the screen. She heard him swallow. _Please look at me_.

"Saw that earlier. Could just be distortion. Or calcification."

"You're thinking fat necrosis? We're not in gaga land. She has about as much fat on her as my cane does. Eccymoses?" His rapid glance at her breast avoided her eyes.

"No dimpling, no retraction."

"Induration?"

"None that I could feel."

"Any trauma lately?" With a start she realized Greg was talking to her.

"Other than running into you in the elevator?" she asked. For a moment they were all silent.

"You've told me about falling while dancing, when someone misses a hold."

"There was a bad one a few months ago. I fell flat on my chest."

The look they exchanged across her told her nothing, then Wilson was bending to insert the needle, Greg moving the probe to guide him.

"Closer to the axilla."

"If you get gel in there, you'll have artifacts."

"I'm not one of your fellows."

The needle went in and out three times. She hadn't expected that, that it would take multiple tries, and she tensed, not even breathing, all the worry of the past few days crashing down on her, Greg's eyes still intent on the screen, lost in thought (_why won't you look at me_) while his hand, the one not holding the probe, lifted from where he had leaned it on the table edge (_do you know what you're doing_) to touch her other breast, stroking the back of one finger along the soft skin below the nipple, back and forth, in a way that anyone would have called fondling. Sexual and yet not. She realized it was entirely unconscious. A wave of something she couldn't name washed through her - not the thrill that would catch her heart any other time he touched her like that. She felt calm inside. He was soothing her, giving her strength, without even being aware of wanting to. Telling her she was still herself to him. It didn't matter that he couldn't meet her eyes at the same time. They were connected, there where his finger caressed her skin, telling her it would be all right.

…………………………………………………………………………..

For some reason he'd thought of the little black girl. Sexual organs, incisions.

Dani had been scared (oh that look when they met at the elevator, his own face probably just as dopy) and he had almost blown it. The shock of her words, so simple, _lump_ and _breast_, letting him know with one hard glance that it was something she could get through without him, had kept him from thinking straight, trying to chase her down like an idiot when she ran being just one highlight of how insane the fear of losing her made him, literally shaking inside imagining her terminal, when he should have been thinking of all the things that would seem confusing to her, explaining, comforting. Leaving it to Wilson instead. Right up to the moment when they saw on the screen what looked like spiculation, the worst sign, mastectomy suddenly a real probability– and her body there on the table, her _presence_, had crashed back in on him. The little black girl with the clitoredectomy had seemed to walk in the door. He'd seen enough mastectomies to know the scar wasn't bad, nothing to beat his, but he suddenly knew how it would feel to her, as he had never imagined how it must be for a woman before, the loss like a mutilation of the soul, as though some sexual capacity were to be cut away and he had wanted to yell, No, _no_, you will never be less beautiful, never less a woman. Instead he had found himself feeling her up. Happened before he even knew he was doing it, just a desire he hadn't been aware of, the desire to let her know that she would still be a woman for him, no matter what. His finger on her breast as deeply sexual and yet undemanding as the two or three times she had reached across below a restaurant table and run a finger along his cock, feeling it harden, the same simple gesture, not trying to be lewd, just saying Here we are, we're connected. Wilson had noticed what he was doing and turned a shade of red more like purple, a look of shocked disgust on his face, clearly not getting it - what did the guy think, that he was going to jump Dani's bones right there on the table? – but it suddenly hadn't mattered. The slides were fixed, Wilson – still half red – had gone off to call in favors at the pathology lab and get a rush job on them, and he had been alone with her as she sat up on the edge of the table with her feet dangling, not putting on her blouse, just clutching it in a ball on her lap. He had put his arms close around her, getting gel all over his shirt front, while her legs went around him and she rested her head on his chest.

The elevator reached the floor of his apartment and he stepped out.

She'd gone home to wait. Wilson, returning with the results in record time, had recommended he call her, but he'd insisted on going home to tell her personally.

She had heard the elevator; she was sitting on her sofa, knees drawn up the way she did when she was upset.

"It's not cancer," he told her.

A long sigh. "Okay."

"It's most likely fat necrosis. Basically scar tissue. A trauma to the breast can make fat cells die and harden. In your case it had to have been every fat cell you own to make a lump like that. You can have it removed, but it'll probably go away on its own." He watched her. "It's still unusual for a woman your size and I want you to get tested for certain blood conditions."

"Okay."

Then she was in his arms and everything went away. The stupid fucked-up world silent for a while.

Much later he pulled back. "Answer me a question, Dani. Why did you run?"

That little pause, always considering what she said before she said it. "I – just couldn't be your patient. The way you turn a patient into a …thing. A body to be repaired."

"That wouldn't have happened with you."

"We'll never know now."

He kissed her. "Am I really that awful?" he murmured.

"Not to me. Usually."

"Great."

"To your patients, yes."

"And before?"

She understood what he meant. "A panic reaction? Stacy – well, you lived with her for five years. Slept with her again less than a year ago. I guess it was the same sort of panic reaction that made me run out of your office."

"Stacy's not a tumor."

"Okay, she's a lump. Who knows if she's malignant or not?"

"I'm a doctor. She's not."

She was studying him. "And how was dinner?"

"Boring. I was in bed early. And don't give me that look – you know what I mean."

What he didn't say was that Stacy had wanted to make it a regular thing and that he had agreed – for reasons obscure even to himself – to meet her for dinner again in two weeks. That information he would share on a need-to-know basis and Dani didn't need to know.

All he knew was that something inside him had grown up that morning while she lay, tensed and hardly breathing, on the table and the needle went in, his mind suddenly grasping what everyone in existence had told him for years, that he really was awful, that he treated people like dirt in an open wound. And that he could change if he wanted to.

………………………………………………………………………..

End of chapter 4


	5. Grownups

(This is a loopback in the ongoing story. It starts somewhere between Chapters 3 and 4 –the Christmas party, New Year's - and then goes past them to the next summer, when they'll have been together about a year. Other things were just going on at the same time that I needed to get in there. I hope it's not too confusing…)

Chapter 5: _Grownups _

_K._

He heard the key turn in the lock behind him. Aside from a glass case, its lid resting beside it on the floor, and a thick coil of brown rope in one corner, the room was empty. He shrugged. He was nine, he could take being locked up. He could take whatever the guy could dish out.

Then the rope in the corner moved.

Slithering (uncoiling?), couldn't be a snake because the guy couldn't have known how much snakes scared him and who would leave the lid off a case for something that huge to get out anyway?

No, it was just a rope. A very big rope.

Then the rope lifted its flat head and fixed its black eyes on him and he knew it was true.

His Aunt Dani's new boyfriend had locked him in a room with a live python.

He spun, screaming, and began to beat on the door.

It had all started when his mom and dad flew with him to his Aunt Dani's. She was going to watch him for a day while they drove on to some clinic in Newark that would help his mom have another baby. New boyfriend of Dani's (yawn), not there when they arrived, except in the odd way his mom asked Dani if they'd be meeting him. (When she thought he wasn't listening his mom had repeated to his dad what Dani told her on the phone. _Much older_, she'd said and – in his aunt's exact words apparently – _he can come across as rude. I think we're being warned_.)

The guy who breezed in an hour later came across as not interested. A glance at him in the living room, playing games on Dani's laptop, then he moved straight on to the others in the kitchen. He'd met a lot of his Aunt Dani's boyfriends, always young, _always_ eager to impress their girlfriend with their dad skills by being total (and very fake) buddies with him. This one told him with a look that he was simply ruining his afternoon off.

He sidled into the kitchen and perched on his dad's knee. "Kevin, this is Greg," His mom the introducer.

"Hi."

"Kevin or Kev?" The guy studied him while he made himself coffee.

"Kevin."

"Then I'll call you Kev." He caned his way to a chair.

"My dad calls me Kev sometimes."

"Then I'll call you Kevin."

He knew a kid at school who played games like that, always contrary. "What happened to your leg?" he asked. The table got quiet. Even Dani looked uneasy. His mom pursed her lips to hush him, confusing him (she was the one who'd said it was impolite when he didn't ask about their neighbor's broken wrist that time), when Greg, who had seemed not to hear, suddenly said, "What does your blood do, Kevin?"

He just stared.

"Come on - what does your blood do there in your body?"

"It runs around, like in your heart and all." No one else was moving.

"What happens if it stops?"

"You die, I guess."

"Good. What happens if it stops in just one place, say your thigh muscle?"

He felt like he was in school. "The – uh – muscle dies?"

"Very good. That's what happened to my leg. I had a blood clot in the thigh muscle -"

"What's a blood clot?"

"Ever make a spitwad? Same thing. Now, what happens to a dead body? Bet you know this from all those crime shows."

He did know and it was getting fun. "It gets stinky and starts to rot."

"Well, before my thigh could get stinky and rot, they cut it open and took the dead muscle out."

"You mean, there's no muscle in there at all?"

"Oh, there's a little left. Just enough to kick kids who annoy me." He wasn't smiling.

Some grownups could do that – get scary on you faster than you could say What did I do. And when they did, he knew the plan – get some distance in there, quietly and without fuss. He got up and walked out of the kitchen.

And stood just behind the door to listen.

"God, I love it when they're young enough to scare that easily." The guy's voice held delight.

"Maybe you shouldn't have scared him, Greg." (His Aunt Dani). "You are going to be spending the afternoon with him."

"_You _and I are going to spend the afternoon with him."

"Same difference."

"Different difference. You're going to do all the – entertaining."

"And what will you be doing?"

"Trailing along behind – " (that dreamy delight again) – "waiting for an opportunity to kick."

His mom sounded strained. "I…thought Dani said on the phone you liked kids."

"_What?"_

"I might have said something like tha –"

"I want my lawyer."

His dad was laughing. "It looks like he's in good hands, Kerstin. Let's go."

Then he was alone with Dani and the guy (who he was emphatically not going to call Greg, not the way his Aunt Dani did anyway, like she was saying God in a church or something, looking at him that way too). By the time they left to visit some natural-history museum at the university (that was his entertainment on a rainy November afternoon), he had dubbed him The Greg in his head.

And The Greg was even less able to cope with his little problem than his mom was. He hated the word hyper; his doctor had said it several times to his mom just the week before and he hadn't liked their voices when they said it. He preferred to be called a handful, at least that meant something. It meant the ashtray in the back of the car broke when he played with it on the way (scary look from The Greg) and it meant he dropped the cane in the mud when he tried to twirl it after they got out (very scary look). It meant he didn't realize it was a street he was about to dash across, a horn suddenly blaring. The Greg grabbed his collar so hard the quick reaction threw him off balance and they both fell backward onto the sidewalk. The Greg fell pretty cool, landing on his ass, still keeping a grip on his cane, but his face got worse than scary, a black sheen spreading beneath the skin that might have just been embarrassment because Dani and a passerby had to help him up, but which went all the way to his eyes and made them hard as jewels. His limp seemed worse after that. His Aunt Dani gave him warning – and somehow pitying - looks. And when he knocked over an urn in the museum, (not breaking it luckily, but chipping a floor tile), The Greg grew oddly calm. He motioned to the guard he'd spoken to at the door and apparently knew well, and then the three of them were leaving Dani behind and heading down a back stairwell (slow and awkward, the cane tapping each step angrily), to a room with a small kitchen, where The Greg locked him in another side room so he and the guard could discuss his punishment.

Which he knew now was to be crushed to death by a python.

No more pride, just his heart racing enough to come unhinged, he was sobbing like a baby, begging (and what if they'd gone away, a terrifying thought). His hands pounding the door hurt. He could feel the snake's breath on the back of his neck now, he thought he might faint, a warm wetness spreading in his pants –

The door flew open and he fell into the kitchen gasping and crawled past legs and a cane until he was out of reach. Through the door he could see the python hadn't moved from its original position. The Greg was staring at him, sniffing the air. "Please do not tell me you wet yourself. _Please _do not tell me that." He wanted to sink into the floor. He watched in horrified, hiccuping fascination as The Greg and his guard buddy entered the room, picked the snake up and put it back in its case. The Greg even stroked the snout, just a household pet here, murmuring "Good Bertha." Then he came out to shake his head at him and give him his jacket to tie at his waist and hide the stain. Dani was waiting for them in the lobby. When she was shown his pants, she looked at The Greg as though she didn't know him. "What did you _do _to him?"

"I helped Harvey" – he indicated the guard back on his post at the door – "with his cluster headaches a couple of years back and in return he introduced me to Bertha. A big-mama black-head python. When she's not on display they let her loose in her little room downstairs. She's harmless enough and I thought it might help Kevin calm down –" he winked "– if he was locked up with her for a while." She was staring. He got loud. "How was I supposed to know the kid had a snake phobia?" Museumgoers turned to look at them.

At home Dani gave him some shorts of hers to wear (she was small but they still hung like a saggy diaper on him) while she washed his pants. In the kitchen he couldn't look at The Greg. "Please don't tell my dad I wet my pants," he said.

"What will I get out of it if I don't?"

He shrugged.

"How about you call me Sir until further notice."

It was an easy deal. The guy was a sucker because he could have demanded so much more. A sucker and a – He couldn't think of another word. All he could think of was the hands, setting the cane aside before lifting the monstrous snake as though it were no more than a dropped coat to be hung away (albeit a heavy one), his wincing limp as he and Harvey carried it back to its case.

His parents accepted their explanation about the pants, The Greg's "He fell in a puddle" so matter-of-fact it was awesome. He wanted to learn to lie like that. His dad noticed the Sirs and gave him an odd look. They stayed for dinner and at some point an argument came out of nowhere, like the car on the street that afternoon, his mom's voice that hard knot it became when she was mad and suppressing it. "Well, he's been diagnosed now. I picked up the prescription yesterday." He threaded back through the conversation he hadn't listened to and realized they were talking about him being hyperactive. "And no, you're right. I haven't started him on it yet."

"He doesn't need R--" The Greg said. He didn't catch the word, though it sounded like Rid-of-him. "He's not hyperactive."

"Look, I know you're a doctor, but you haven't spent time with him-"

"And how much time did the pediatrician spend – five minutes? Oh, you're right. I'm sorry. Five minutes _is_ more than an afternoon – no, wait. How does time work?"

His dad suddenly said, "Kevin, why don't you go play on Dani's laptop some more?"

He left and took up his position behind the door.

The argument was like waves battering a shore – loud and then soft. Holding itself back. Why couldn't grownups just yell at each other and get it over with? The Greg got points for insistence, repeating over and over: "He doesn't have ADHD. Don't give him the R--." It sounded more like Ridalin now. He could hear his mom fuming.

"Did this pediatrician mention alternatives? Check his reaction to food additives? The parents can modify their behavior –"

"Oh now it's all our fault, right? We just don't have the patience –"

" - too much verbal input and certain brains go haywire. There are methods you can learn – using gestures to get what you want, training him with specific moves. I know it sounds Pavlovian –"

"My son is not a dog."

"Your son is probably gifted." (He wondered if that had to do with getting too many toys at Christmas). "Everything interests him and he can't assimilate it."

"His doctor diagnosed him. He knows what he's doing."

"Oh, right. Ol' Doc Shucks from Bumfuck, Pennsylvania – he's always up on the latest." The table got very quiet. "Ouch, stop kicking me." That apparently to Dani seated next to him.

His mother's voice had reached that deadly quiet of a bomb ticking. "He's a very good pediatrician."

"How about Dad? You get any say on what goes into your kid?"

"Kerstin spends more time with him," his dad said. "It's her call."

"And I do spend time with him. You only spent an afternoon, as you pointed out. You don't know how bad it can get." (He felt ashamed when she talked like that. He didn't try to be bad.)

"Oh, I _get_ it." The Greg's voice dripped sarcasm. "The medicine's not for Kevin. It's for Mommy, so she can have some peace and quiet."

More than quiet. Dead quiet.

"_How dare you? _How dare you suggest I'm doing this for myself? You blowhard bastard." (File that one away for future use). A chair scraped and he just had time to slip onto the piano bench, pretend to pick out notes, when his mom came banging through the door and into the bedroom. Dani followed, turning back at the door to say, "You've really managed to win friends and influence people again, Greg."

They didn't stay long. At the door The Greg looked at his mom, who was doing a good job of not looking back, and said something strange. He said, "Hate me." She looked up. "Go ahead and hate me. But don't give him the stuff just because you hate me."

On the plane his mom turned to him. "Your dad and I have to go for another consultation in two weeks. You'll stay with them again. Are you all right with that?"

"Sure. Cool."

His dad looked at him. "Did you really fall in a puddle?"

"Yeah."

So matter-of-fact.

………………………………………………………………………….

"I should have known that wouldn't work."

"What about it didn't work?"

"Oh, only that you traumatized my nephew, and that my sister hates you."

"I didn't know you'd planned to impress your sister with me."

"You know, she was married at 24, having a child at 25. She's had a family all this time, while I've just sort of rolled from one relationship to the next. Nothing ever lasted, and I know she thinks it's my fault, that there's something wrong with me. And maybe she was right up to now. Did you know, this is by far the longest I've ever got with anyone?"

"That's good. Isn't it?"

"I'll have to listen to her now telling me how I've got it wrong again. I had just…hoped to hear someone finally acknowledge that I've got it right."

"You've got it right."

……………………………………………………………………………..

He stared down at the man's open chest.

Blood and bone and pink gumps of flesh. The heart was still beating. Had to remember every bit of it for show-and-tell at school.

The Greg had displayed his rare lying talents again when he brought him to the operating-room gallery, by going up to the couple already watching, relatives of the guy on the slab, he guessed, and giving them some screwy story, see, the kid's granddad had a heart transplant the week before (thank you, turned out fine), but did they mind if the kid watched this one so his nightmares would stop?

A little scary at first. Not watching a surgery for the first time, but the moment that morning when Aunt Dani had said she was busy and he would be spending the afternoon with The Greg.

The Greg's idea of entertainment was the hospital.

"That's a machine heart." The voice near his ear was soft, fascinated (didn't the guy see this kind of stuff every day?). "Those pumps turning, keeping the blood going, is like a big steel heart outside the body. Cardiopulmonary bypass. Just call it the pumper." He tried to remember every word for later.

And later, when his parents were back and they all sat in a restaurant (The Greg getting constant calls on his cell phone about some patient), he announced that he was going to be a doctor. His parents had already been upset that he'd been allowed to watch an operation. They smiled and nodded. The Greg shut his phone and frowned. "You can't," he said. He felt his mom beside him bristle. "Have to have good grades for that, and yours aren't."

"I'll get better."

"Of course you will," his mother murmured. Not taking him seriously.

"How?" The Greg looked at him.

"I'll – um – pay more attention in class."

"That's a good start." He shrugged. "Two words you need to know if you ever do become a doctor. 'More tests.'" It was what he'd just said on the phone, or rather yelled, while his parents stared at him. "Buy you time when you've just ordered the best steak in town. Repeat after me, 'More tests.'"

"It's good to know it's not just us you're rude to," his mother said, indicating the phone. "I imagined you were probably rude to colleagues, and I was right - you do not disappoint."

"I hear that from women all the time."

The talk turned adult, the kind of thing he usually tuned out. The men made several jokes he didn't understand.

"Don't tell the cute brunette here," Greg motioned at Dani, "- but women are all over me."

"You know, they probably would be if you weren't so abrasive," Dani told him.

"So I'll shave."

"You're also a walking bad pun."

"A walking-bad pun?" He changed the emphasis, rolled his eyes at his cane. When he laughed he looked so different. "I'll have them stencil that on my door. So my patients will know what they're in for."

"You don't even know what your patients are in for."

"That's what they're in for."

His parents were laughing too. Dani suddenly looked like she had something up her sleeve. "Hate to ruin all this hilarity," she told the rest of them, "but you should know what you're witnessing here. It's called two Vicodin kicking in."

He knew The Greg took medicine for his leg. He didn't know why they all got quiet. "Ignore her," The Greg told them. "This is an old argument." He glared at Dani. "And a personal one."

"They're family."

"Not my family."

"Actually," said his dad the lawyer, "under common law we sort of are."

The Greg glanced at them all one by one and shuddered theatrically.

"Great theory of Dani's, isn't it? I'm in pain, I swallow something that takes away the pain – but it's not the lack of pain that puts me in a better mood, it's the pill itself. Notice anything wrong with that reasoning?"

"It's an opy--," she informed them (another word he couldn't understand). "It's the same thing they make heroin out of."

"Someone's been googling."

Dani seemed almost sad. "I would just rather know sometimes, Greg, that I'm talking to the real you."

He looked at her for a long time. "Did it ever occur to you that the painless me might be the real one?" A waiter dropped off the scotch he'd ordered and the fight continued on a whispered level, her head near her boyfriend's, shutting the rest of them out, though they could hear every word. The Greg had another pill out, apparently ready to wash it down with the drink. "Not with the booze. Please." His aunt sounded desperate. He felt embarrassed for her.

The Greg swallowed the pill demonstratively, and with a big I'll-show-you gesture picked up his drink – and handed it across to his dad. "Hope you like scotch," he murmured.

So the guy could do something for someone else's sake. If there was one thing he knew from school, it was that you didn't do what a girl asked you to. Very uncool. Yet there was something in the simple gesture, the calm hand holding the glass out waiting for his dad to take it, that seemed so…courageous, it made him think maybe he'd gotten it all wrong.

………………………………………………………………………….

_D._

She watched him limp to the bed where she lay and hang his cane over the headboard. They had ended up in her apartment after her sister and company left, the dinner quiet after her Vicodin remark, livened only when she and Kerstin played at irritating him by speaking German. He'd put an end to that by saying he'd take a class and learn it if he had to. She knew that he could.

Instead of snuggling in beside her, he sat down on the edge of the quilt and looked at her. His hair, messed to tight curls from his shower, made her throat catch.

"I'm only going to say this once," he told her. "I don't want you discussing my addiction in front of others. It's a private matter."

"Maybe it shouldn't be."

"Oh let me see. You think - what? - if you embarrass me in front of people enough it'll shame me into being able to kick the stuff?"

"Why not?"

"That's just stupid, Dani." She took a deep breath and let it out. "I'm sure the rehab clinics will be pleased as punch to know you've found the cure for physical dependency." He collapsed onto his back beside her. "Look – I need this stuff. I didn't get addicted _purely_ out of weakness. And I believe I gave you fair warning. This is me. You knew what you were getting."

"No one ever knows what they're getting." She laid a hand on his chest. Tensed, hard against her palm. Her heart felt out of whack. In two weeks he would be taking her to the hospital Christmas party, a thought that scared her. He hadn't even introduced her when she'd gone there to see Martha. As though he were ashamed of her. In some ways, she knew, she was like the little bottle in his pocket. Four months had been enough to make him dependent on her (and oh she was dependent on him now, for happiness, for everything), but it also meant she was his dirty little secret when it came to admitting to others, or even to himself, how much he felt. If he felt. She was his personal matter. If not a bottle then a doll he carried around in his pocket and took out when needed, very real to him, the world they created together beautiful and strange, but god forbid his weird little obsession meant the doll started having a say in his life.

There would be some breaking point, she sensed, when he would have to start taking her very seriously. She sensed it wouldn't be tonight.

"There are just other things you could take, right? What about Dilaudid?"

He gave her his dramatic look. "_Wow_, Frau Doctor, you really know from painkillers. Look, do me – and yourself - a favor, Dani, and _stop _googling things you know nothing about."

"I can worry about you if I want to. This article talked about liver damage and –"

"Whoa, whoa - _what _am I doing here?" The question stunned her. "I'm lying in bed with the hottest woman in town and we're talking about my liver. If anything's sick, that is. Look - just do what I say. We're not talking about this in front of others. Subject closed."

And it was for him, she thought. In a moment he would turn to her, cock already swollen hard; he would touch her, hands stroking gently through the flimsy gown, the heat of his palms spreading along her meridians, possessing her, and she wanted it so much and suddenly didn't want it. Or rather wanted something else from him.

"I'm a part of your life," she told him. She tried to look angry, a thing she wasn't good at. "I…have a say, in whatever happens to you. If I want to talk about your addiction in front of others, I'm going to and you won't be able to stop me."

He was so much better at looking angry. "You know what?" He was already standing up, grabbing his cane. "Sleep alone."

The shock of it left her speechless. He could be boyish at times, with his jokes and gags, he could even pout, but he had never been childish. She sat up while he snatched the clothes he would have to put on to go across the hall, every move speaking rage, flipping her off with his entire body. She thought of his hand, holding out the scotch to Dan that evening. He hobbled to the door.

"I love you," she said.

It stilled him. She knew she had never said it before, just following his lead (we non-committers don't go there), and yet she was very aware that she'd never said it to any man. As the TV show had it, she'd just lost her I-love-you virginity. Her throat felt hot.

He gazed at the door as if it were the most fascinating piece of wood in the world, then his eyes closed, either in pain or utter joy. Finally he turned.

"Then you have a long hard road ahead of you," he said, and walked out.

………………………………………………………………………….

_G._

Two days.

He sat at the piano and ran his fingers over the keys without playing. Two days. Not one second without thinking about her, listening for the slightest bump against the wall as though it were a bump against his own skin, his heart turning to mush at work every time the phone rang. He knew withdrawal pain when he felt it. The silent treatment was crap, but boy it worked. He supposed he could crush something again if this pain kept up, the way he'd crushed his hand that time (insane for a player of musical instruments, he could have done permanent damage, which showed how desperate he'd been then), yet what would he crush now, what body part most affected by withdrawal from her?

A glance at his crotch. Nope, not going to happen.

She'd said… God, she'd said it, and he'd frozen, every cell yearning to rush back to the bed and take her in his arms. He'd studied the bedroom door instead, the way the light fell through the opening, the sliver of bookcase visible beyond, how his hand rested on the knob, preserving every detail so he would always remember how it was when she'd said the words for the first time, the glow inside him so thick and throbbing he thought he would choke. When his family had been stationed in Japan he'd often jogged alone at dawn in the woods behind the compound, and one morning an elk had stepped from the trees in front of him, sleek and splendid, freezing him the same way she did with her words, a moment like religion, his mind whispering _this is life this is magnificent._

The hell with it, he had to see her. He grabbed his cane and stepped out the door. She was coming out her own door. No knapsack, flip-flops on her feet. She'd been coming to see him. They stared at each other.

"You weren't – uh – coming to see me, were you?" she asked.

"No, I was going to jog up and down the stairs for exercise."

"Oh."

Neither moved.

"One of us has to go for his gun first," he told her.

"We could stand here until someone comes by and sees us."

"Just neighbors chatting in the hall." He hobbled to her, the pull so strong he might as well have tried to stand in a hurricane. Her scent rose to him, sweet, a forest at dawn. He towered over her and she looked up. She often told him she was getting a permanent crick in her neck the longer they stayed together. So small, and so powerful. "Naturally it's me who has to cave," he murmured.

"You're the one who stormed out like a child. I'll have to cave if I want to forgive you for that."

"Okay. I walked down the hall. If you let me in, then we both caved. That a deal?"

Once inside, she took the armchair, leaving him the sofa. Keeping her distance. He tensed for the lecture, drinking in her face (two days, dude, pull yourself together) and telling himself to listen, but he'd missed something already because she was talking about her nephew.

"Doesn't that – create a kind of responsibility?" She was making some point about people affecting one another (why couldn't he think straight when she sat there like that?), about the import of everything he did on everyone else. "If Kevin has started to look up to you, which I doubt you intended, then doesn't that create a connection that you can't just walk away from?"

"Yeah, and if I don't smile at the cashier she may go home and kill herself." He hated it when she tried to unravel his mind. He was the one who was supposed to do the philosophizing, or at least the metaphorizing. "I know what you're getting at, Dani. No man is an island. Women are sometimes. One of those deserted tropical ones you'd like to be washed up on the shores of. Bikini atoll maybe or – "

"Would you stop it? And if you touching Kevin's life in even that little way creates a responsibility toward him, how much more responsibility do you have to me to – at least try?" He knew what was coming. He felt numb inside. "Everything you do, every pill you pop, affects me now too, whether you want it to or not. If I asked you to do it for me – not for yourself at all – just for my sake, then would you at least try to get off the Vicodin?"

"No." The answer was immediate, pistol-shot back at her, because he'd anticipated the question, yet she looked stunned. She stood and went through the kitchen to lean outside on the balcony rail. After a moment he followed. Trucks screamed from the distant highway. She turned. Her eyes were red.

"If it helps any, I'm taking less than I was when I met you," he told her truthfully. "A sort of natural reduction. Maybe the only kind possible."

She shrugged. "What hurts is not that you don't want to try for my sake, but that you wouldn't even consider it. Which I get from how fast you answered. Five seconds of pretending to think it over wouldn't have hurt you, would it?" She sighed. "I guess I just want you to think my opinion is worth something. To paraphrase you – what in the hell am I doing here?"

He suddenly realized what it was all about. What he had to say.

She'd started it last night, said the first half and was waiting for his reply, had been waiting for two days, the echo that should have come naturally as he stood with his hand on the door. He'd said something else instead, he couldn't remember what.

He opened his mouth to speak –

- and the imp of memory said, _Remember the last time you said it_.

A hospital bed, he was diving into coma, vision already gray at the edges. It was the last thing he said before the dark and when he awoke everything in the universe had been different.

"I…need you," he told Dani. She looked away. "When you…" – (why was it hard?) –"when you touch me it makes the pain go away." It was the most intimate thing he could think to say, because it was true, a truth torn out of him, yet she only shrugged again.

"Great. Thank you. You just made me the ultimate sex object. I'm a 105-pound pill for your pain."

"No!" Night wind caught her hair and she pushed it from her face. Winter was coming. "You know it's not that, Dani. If it were just about the sex, I could have hookers going in and out –"

"Well, your bank account would run out at some point. Me you get free every night."

"You know what I mean."

"No, I don't, Greg. I really don't." Still waiting.

He approached and she tensed. Just a hand, just reach your hand out. Please. He could feel his fingers burn to touch her, to be touched by her, the same way they twitched when he felt for his bottle in his pocket, when he shook it to make sure it wasn't empty, the blood thick in the fingertips. Just reach out.

"It's…you," he said. "You do something nobody else can. It's what you say or it's the way you look at me, I don't even know how, but everything bad just stops –"

And then she was in his arms. And he proved himself once again incapable of shutting up when he should have. "You're like this elk," he said, but her lips were at his, hushing him; she had to crane when he didn't bend to her because like a moron he was still trying to talk, and she murmured, "I don't even know what that means" (a kiss, pain dissolving down through the balcony, to the street, up to the stars). "I don't want to know. Just shut up."

There was more to come, he realized. So much more. The stars rained down light and he held her.

………………………………………………………………………….

_K._

So instead of the _yaawwn_ his visits to Aunt Dani had once been, or the Don't-leave-me-alone-with-this-guy they had looked like they were going to be when The Greg first showed up, there came to be a rhythm to them, an anticipation - when his parents flew with him or drove up for long weekends – of what new thing The Greg would have in store for him. He got to listen to hearts through a stethoscope and ride a table into some huge tube that had to do with magnets ("Unless you've got a couple of thou in your pocket, we're not running the test," The Greg told him). One Saturday they went to an archery range ("Haven't been here in years") where The Greg showed him and Dani how to shoot an arrow into a target fifty yards away. The guy wasn't bad himself, hitting the bull's-eye every time once he got back in practice. "I didn't know Greg could do that," Dani told him later in private. "It's a sport that doesn't need legwork, I suppose – you know, if you keep at him, Kevin, maybe he'll go more often. He needs something." He asked her about the pills, something he hadn't dared to do before, and she explained about the pain. Tried to explain addiction. "You've noticed he's in a bad mood lately. It's because he's trying to take less. We had this little…fight over New Year's." It was a new thought, that there might be something you couldn't stop putting in you. "I think I'm addicted to Cheetos," he told her, very seriously. "I eat a whole package sometimes." She smiled and told him not to worry.

Spring rolled around. Aunt Dani said she wouldn't be going with them to the hospital for a fundraiser one weekend and The Greg said, "She's traumatized."

"I am _not_ traumatized." He didn't know what that meant.

"Means she thought she was sick for a while and so she can't stand being in a hospital." The two of them were looking at each other the way grownups did sometimes, challenging, saying things they hadn't said. "She hasn't come for lunch with me in a month. Ever since she had this little test there."

"I'll meet you in the cafeteria on Monday. How's that?"

The Greg smiled and whispered, "Traumatized."

"_Not_ traumatized."

An Easter-egg hunt in the apartment, while rain lashed the windows. His mom sat in the kitchen with Dani, tired again, she said, which supposedly came from the baby in her, while the men hid the eggs. He wouldn't have found the last one if The Greg hadn't subtly knocked over the book it was hidden in. A hollowed-out place inside the pages. Weirdest thing he'd ever seen. "I use it to hide Easter eggs a lot," The Greg told him. His dad just looked funny.

The Greg helped him with his math homework. They sat in the kitchen one Saturday while Dani cooked, his parents gone again, the voice that had already started out strained getting harder and harder when he didn't understand ("Bad leg day," he'd heard him murmur to Dani when he thought he wasn't listening; he supposed he was having a bad-brain day himself because he couldn't concentrate), until The Greg finally yelled, "I _just_ explained that – how long do you store something in that sieve of yours up there? Two seconds?"

He got up and walked out, not because it was scary (he was long past that) but because he didn't want the guy to see him cry. Their voices in the kitchen were low.

"You didn't have to be that way, Greg."

"Oohh yes I did. It did me a world of good."

"You may not realize this, but Kevin worships the ground you walk on."

"You mean the ground I hobble on. Well, then he's learned an important lesson – even God can lose His patience."

"Kerstin says he talks about you so much it's making Dan a little jealous – a sort of Who's-your-daddy thing."

A long pause, then he heard the cane tap the floor. The Greg stood beside him where he perched on the piano bench pretending interest in the keys. He was too ashamed to wipe at the tears and they dripped off his chin. "We're going over it again until you understand fractions," The Greg told him.

"Yes sir."

"And stop calling me sir." That was a surprise. Instead of marching him back to the kitchen, he sat beside him on the bench and picked out a chord, and then another. For the next hour he taught him piano, the difference between a third and a fourth interval, octaves and how to run up and down with his thumbnail, other stuff he wouldn't remember later, but when they went to hit the books again he suddenly understood fractions.

It was the coolest thing.

Summer was sweltering. He cheered when school was out. His mother's stomach had grown into a real stomach – not a beachball as his dad teasingly told her, he thought, but a good-size pillow stuffed up in there. So he was going to have a sister, yawn. Greg and Dani flew down for one of the hottest weekends, his Gran showed up, and they had a barbecue with the neighbors and kids he knew, everyone chilling beside – and in - the pool. His aunt seemed happier than he'd ever seen her – and The Greg too, when he thought about it. They laughed and smiled and touched each other so much it was embarrassing, though none of the other adults seemed to think much about it; it was more as if they caught it too, like a germ, laughing along with them. He asked Greg if he'd swim with him. "Didn't bring my trunks," was the answer.

"I can lend you a pair," his dad told him and the poolside table got quiet. Dani whispered something a little urgently to his dad and he looked chagrined. "Oh. Didn't think about that." The women all looked as uncomfortable as though they were sitting on pins.

"Well, _daddy_," Greg said, "you can explain it to the kid."

"Sure. See, Kevin, Greg's got this humungous ugly scar on his leg – think Frankenstein – and he doesn't want anyone looking at it."

Made sense. "Oh. Okay." He was turning away, but he caught The Greg's huge grin at Dani, his relaxed "Who said men were complicated?"

He played chase around the pool with Mark and Kyle, hiding the miniature cannonball from his fortress playset in his mouth when they tried to take it from him, logical place while they ran around the table, till he tripped over a deck chair. Something happened that hurt his throat. A cessation, something always there that abruptly wasn't. He realized it was his breathing. Then he was stumbling into the table, scattering plates, scrambling for his mom, panic like flame in his head, god it hurt, every bit of color bright and hard in his eyes _just make it stop!_ If they would just take the thing out of his throat, why didn't they take it out, all of them shouting, moving now, Dani running into the house yelling Greg which made no sense, _he_ was the one who couldn't breathe – and then Greg was there, his dad shouting whether he knew that _Hyme-lick_ thing, whatever that was, and The Greg spun him around and _hurt him_, hurt him _bad _(why was he doing that why didn't he help him) hugging him from behind and shoving a fist into his ribs with the force of a brick, _no don't!_ Lights flashed in his head, red and orange. He hurt him twice more, until he thought his head would burst - he wanted to cry for him to stop but he had no voice, nothing left inside to struggle with, nothing but the fire in his chest, an animal crushing him from within, the python he'd had nightmares about for weeks had finally got him and this was what it was to be crushed to death –

He heard Greg (why did his voice seem far away?) yell for a knife and a straw (was he going to suck the toy out of him?), his mom screaming that he was blue (_blue!?_), then he was on his back and The Greg was holding a steak knife over him with ketchup still on it, like a bad B movie, but still scary, everything going gray at the edges, what had Mr. Thompson called it in that workshop – film deterioration? The Greg pointed the knife straight at his throat. Very scary movie. It struck him that he could just go to sleep and skip the rest and so he did –

……………………..

" – Straw. Quick quick quick!"

She almost dropped it, but his hands were steady. He used the knife to cut two inches from the plastic and worked it into the bloody hole he'd made in Kevin's throat. She felt faint. Kerstin was moaning _oh my god_ over and over; Dan, with his forearm under Kevin's neck to extend the throat as Greg had instructed, was leaning his forehead on his son's cheek, his eyes closed as though praying (he was the atheist, she remembered, inanely, as though it mattered now). Greg bent to puff twice, hard, into the stump of straw, watching the chest. The thin body jerked, little spasms of the straw, and then the chest was rising on its own. He was _breathing_. Relief hit her, a joy like heat, the awe one must feel at a miraculous event: a birth, someone awakening from a coma: _he's breathing!_

The neighbor Ted Munn rushed from the house with the phone. "Got 911! They're sending an ambulance."

Greg held the straw in place, two fingers of his other hand at the pulse on Kevin's neck. He turned to her. "Help your mom," he said.

"_What?"_

"She's about to faint. Get her down before she hits her head."

Her mother stood half behind them, almost paler than Kevin. He'd seen it with one glance. She went to help her and when she returned to his side, he'd been patched in to the ambulance, asking their ETA and telling them Kevin's pulse. His voice sounded odd when he said it.

"Dani, you're going to hold this straw in place." Dan and Kerstin were staring at him. Greg wrapped her fingers around the base of the straw, her knuckles in Kevin's blood. She wanted to cry that she couldn't, but his hand positioning hers was calm. His eyes locked on hers, telling her she could. His other fingers were still on the neck artery, checking the pulse.

"Why – what are you going to be doing?" Her voice sounded stupid with fear.

"Keeping his heart going." Two more seconds with his fingers on the pulse, then he muttered, "There he goes," and he started CPR, thirty pumps then two breaths while sweat poured into his eyes and a siren growled in the distance, Kerstin screaming, "Did his heart stop? Is he _dead_?!"

Then the medics were there. Greg grabbed the paddles. Every shock hurt to watch, the little body in its swimtrunks flopping like a fish. On the third one, the fat EMT turned, "Got a pulse," and Greg collapsed to the side in relief, almost dropping the paddles, his forehead near the ground. She couldn't see his face. Everyone was talking at once. Kevin's eyelids fluttered and before Kerstin could move to his side, Greg had pushed her back, her eyes widening in disbelief, and he was bending over Kevin. "Kevin," he said loudly, "this is Greg. If you want your mommy, blink twice." It was absurd, why didn't he let her go to him, and then she realized he was checking for brain damage. She felt nauseous. The crowd on the lawn was silent, waiting.

Then Kevin blinked twice and Kerstin almost fell on him, sobbing.

Two men had to help Greg up and he stumbled off into the house, while the medics busied themselves with Kevin. When she could think straight, it struck her how pale he'd been. She found him in the downstairs bathroom. He sat on the floor against the tub, clutching his leg. "Sat on it wrong," he gasped, and she remembered his odd posture while he pumped on Kevin's chest. She knelt beside him. "I need…I need morphine."

"Would the medics have any?"

" –my shaving kit upstairs. There's a syringe, hidden at the bottom of the kit in a toothbrush holder." He looked at her, pleading, his eyes red-rimmed, and she wanted to cry. "Don't let anyone see you."

She moved fast, everyone too concentrated on Kevin outside to pay attention. The syringe in its red toothbrush holder was ugly, an evil little vial of ugly, of all the things he had to go through. She slipped it into her waistband under her shirt. When she got back, he'd already found the band from someone's bathrobe hanging on the back of the door and tied it around his upper arm to pop up the vein. "Tighten that." His voice wasn't his own. She watched the needle go in, so ugly, and she leaned her head on his shoulder as though it would help.

"I'm going to –" Dan entered, then stopped. "What's that?"

"It's morphine," she told him. "Please shut the door."

She could sense Greg loosening beside her, as clearly as though the liquid cascaded through her own veins. "Don't let me do this again," he murmured.

"Doesn't it work?" asked Dan.

"Works too well." His eyes were closed. "God, it's better than sex."

"That scares her," Dan joked feebly, then looked ashamed of himself. "I came to tell you I'm riding in the ambulance. Can you drive Kerstin?" She nodded.

And when they finally stepped out, Greg took one look at her sister, who stood with her hand braced oddly on the patio door while the medics carted Kevin off, and he growled, "I'm going to start applying triage in a minute." He stumped over to her. "That's a labor pain."

"No!" It came out a gasp. She knew her sister was stubborn. It was why she and Greg got along like two eighteen-wheelers on the same side of the road, but it seemed a bad time to be in denial. "It can't be," she gasped. "I'm in the thirty-fourth week."

"Which gives you a whopping three-percent chance of losing the baby. Gee, if there was only some way of getting you to the hospital fast." He called back Dan and told him Kerstin would be taking the ambulance in his place.

So while Kevin lay on the third floor of Pittsburgh Mercy with his throat bandaged, his mother lay on the fifth, the contractions stilled for the time. Greg called his hospital and she called Georg and they arranged to stay longer. They visited Kevin. He was propped up in the bed, a bandage at his neck, tucking away into a hospital lunch that looked like a dog's breakfast. When he saw Greg he grinned from ear to ear.

"You slit my throat," he said happily. His voice was still rough.

"Yeah. Cool, huh?" Greg wasn't listening, she saw, busying himself reading the chart on the bed. He found a stethoscope and held it to Kevin's heart. The black nurse glared at him. "I've always wanted to listen through one of these," he told her. "My toy one at home is crap."

Kevin seemed so delighted to be checked by Greg that it frightened her a little. He sat very still and struggled to suppress a grin. _Hero worship_, her mind whispered. Or rather it was her inner child that spoke, the one that knew what Kevin felt, the sweet and risky rush of abandoning yourself to someone you think the world of. _Don't let him down_, another whisper, though she didn't know if it was advice to Kevin or a plea to Greg.

So lost in thought it took her a moment to notice how quiet Greg was. He told the nurse he wanted to speak to the attending, adding a last-second "Please", as though just remembering it wasn't his hospital. The man who arrived, harried, ten minutes later was young and supercilious. When he heard the name House, something in his pretty-boy face changed. He introduced himself as Dr. Mayberry.

"Mayberry?" Greg looked incredulous. "As in Andy Griffith and all that?" She wanted to tell him to tone it down. "Tell me why this kid hasn't had an ECG."

"There's no indication –"

"His heart stopped."

"He wasn't getting any air. Usually the case with an obstructed trachea, Dr. House."

Greg went still. He could mouth off at will; others were not allowed to. "I traeched him. He was getting enough oxygen for a healthy 10-year old. His heart shouldn't have stopped. There's something wrong with it."

The argument that ensued centered around needed beds and unneeded tests. Mayberry was going to release Kevin the next day, no further observation. Whatever he had heard about Gregory House apparently made him overjoyed to be in control of the situation. Greg's rant seemed based on what Kevin's pulse had done while he lay choking and which she didn't pretend to understand. As they grew louder Kevin stared down at the bed, as though fearful Greg's wrath was really meant for him, and she took his hand and whispered, "It's not your fault."

Dan's arrival - with a huge wrapped gift and a bemused look - cut them off. She followed Greg out to the hall. "There's still time before tomorrow," he said. "He has to have an angiogram."

"Couldn't you test him yourself at Princeton? Cuddy would let you."

"Now that I know this, I wouldn't even recommend him flying."

Dan could drive him, she thought, but the urgency, the lightning beneath Greg's skin, made her ask instead: "What is it you know, Greg?"

"I don't know." He shrugged. "His heart sounds fine now."

They stood in the rush of visitors and she studied his distracted face. "Do you ever stop diagnosing?" she asked.

He looked at her for a long moment. "Do you ever stop dancing?"

………………………………………………………………………..

The head of cardiology in Pittsburgh was letting herself go gray with dignity. The salt-and-pepper hair framed a kind face and smart eyes. The tag said Bruckner.

They had caught her at eight in the morning as she arrived at the hospital. Kevin would be released at eleven. Greg's courteous approach once the cardiologist was pointed out to them had surprised her beyond measure, a deference she had never seen in him, least of all to another doctor. With a twinge of shock – as the three of them found a niche behind a potted plant so they could hear the tape he flourished – she realized that he was flirting with the woman, in the most subtle manner imaginable. Playing her intellect, and her fifty-something femininity, like a keyboard.

The tape was of Kevin's heartbeat. He'd bought a recorder and gone back to the hospital the evening before. "Do you hear what I hear?" he asked Dr. Bruckner, sing-songing it to the tune of Little Drummer Boy, and then more seriously: "I know that you do. It's very subtle." She was nodding, eyes closed. "It does amaze me that I have to do this to get a heart listened to." She shushed him with a raised finger for another second, then stopped the tape.

"Mitral valve," she said. "There's a catch there."

His answering smile was warm and vibrant. Making them co-conspirators. "I thought that if the head of cardiology talked to Mayberry…"

"Dr. Mayberry is the attending?"

"The very young Dr. Mayberry." Playing the age card, she realized. We're the experienced ones. She shuddered inside at how deftly – and shamelessly - he could manipulate when he wanted to.

Dr. Bruckner promised to do something. After she had rounded a corner (their handshake held half a second too long), he ejected the tape from the player and tossed it into the nearest wastebasket.

"Shouldn't you keep Kevin's tape?" she asked.

"Oh, that's not Kevin. It's some other nine-year old with a heart problem." She stared. "I had Foreman find a tape and overnight it to me. Hey, let's go tell Kevin they're going to pour ink in his heart and take a picture of it."

…………………………………………………………………………..

The damage they found in Kevin's heart stunned everyone except Greg. Or rather it did, she realized, his gaze locking far away over the heads of the cardiologists as they described to Dan what they'd seen in the angio, his eyes narrowed, already deciphering what it meant. What he would do about it. She followed him to Kerstin's room on the fifth floor, her sister's pale face leeching away its strength when she heard the news, while he drilled her about every illness Kevin had ever had - fever, rash, headaches, joints – until she started to cry. Another shock, seeing her sister so vulnerable. Dan came in to tell her, found they had beaten him to it, and sat on the bed to hug her. "The doctors will want to talk to us both –"

"Blisters on his feet?" They all stared at Greg. "When was that, Kerstin? Did he have them in his mouth too?"

It was as though he inhabited another world. Kerstin's tears meant nothing, garnering from him only a "Harness your hormones for one second and answer me." When she managed to finish describing Kevin's rash from months earlier, itchy feet she hadn't even taken him to a doctor for, Greg's expression grew mesmerized and he left to look for Mayberry.

She found them near the nurses' station. Greg held the file that said _Murdock, Kevin _and which he had obviously snatched from the nurse to review. Mayberry was telling him to put it down. "You do not work here, Dr. House."

"Low selenium." His voice was just theatrical enough to make white coats up and down the hall turn their way. "Right here on the third page. Doesn't exactly jump out at you, but then doctors aren't the kind to be bothered by details, are they? Are they, Dr. Mayberry?"

"What are you getting at?"

Greg eyed him as though leveling a gun at him. "He has Keshan's."

The doctor's face took on a new look. The wariness of someone who realizes the person they're talking to is truly insane. "I – uh. You'll have to give me a moment here, Dr. House. It's just that I'd heard all these stories about you. I'll need a moment to assimilate the fact that they were _all true_." The nurse behind him turned away grinning.

"Take your moment. Take five. Then check him for –"

"You want me to believe that a ten-year old middle-class American has a disease almost never seen outside one small province of China?"

"The virus that causes Keshan's is common, even here in America. Four months ago he had hand foot and mouth disease. Without the hand and the mouth, so a doctor never saw it. Do an Elisa on him for coxsackie virus –"

"Coxsackie alone does _not_ damage the heart - that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." Mayberry had grown loud. More people stopped to listen. She wanted to take Greg's arm before he went ballistic, imagined her fingers on the muscle there tensed hard as rock, but she waited.

And he blew her expectations by staying calm, the effort of it visible only in a tightening at his temples.

"His immune system was shot due to a selenium deficiency," he explained. "It allowed the virus to invade the heart, where it chewed its merry way through the heart wall. The reason Keshan's cardiomyopathy shows up in that itsy-bitsy province of China is that the soil there has the lowest selenium deposits in the world. The inhabitants are all deficient, and a virus we thumb our noses at here can get its claws into their hearts and make them look like they've gone through a shredder."

Mayberry looked delighted. "Perfect theory. Except he doesn't have a selenium deficiency."

Greg thrust the open file at his face as though he wanted to wrap him in it. "You measured the _blood serum_. Only whole blood will have enough red and white blood cells to show how much selenium's really there." For a second she thought he was going to make it. Then he added: "You moron."

Mayberry looked stunned, then he shut like a book. "Couldn't be that deficient unless he was starved. I'm not ordering more tests." He turned to leave and Greg followed, their voices echoing down the hall.

"He was hospitalized for pneumonia twice last year. Didn't eat a thing. He's sick a lot. He could have contracted the virus then. Or there may be some underlying cause for the low selenium. If anyone had thought to get a history from the mom –"

"The kid hasn't got Keshan's!"

"The kid's got a name, it's Kevin –" They disappeared into an office, leaving her alone.

"There _was_ a catch." The voice at her ear made her turn. Dr. Bruckner stood studying her. "I checked back. The damage they found had nothing to do with what I heard on the tape. That wasn't a tape of that little boy at all, was it?" She didn't know what to say. "Tell me, does he pull that one often with doctors? Sucking up to get what he wants?"

"I asked him that later," she told her truthfully. "He said the irregularity on the tape really was subtle, that he'd expected you would just go along and pretend to hear something to avoid embarrassment. He was truly amazed when you pinpointed it."

"That's kind of you, though I doubt he said anything like that. You know, I was listening just now. Mayberry's reaction is understandable. Keshan's is an insane diagnosis." Her gaze for a moment seemed far away. "I'm going to go over Mayberry's head to have the test ordered."

The test showed coxsackie antibodies. It was proof that proved nothing. Kevin would be implanted with an ICD ("Not a pacemaker," Greg assured Dan and Kerstin, struggling, she could hear, to keep the layman-impatience out of his voice). It would rest beneath his chest skin, with leads into his heart, ready to start it if it ever stopped again. All his life he would have to take care not to dislodge it. "Won't ever be a professional linebacker," was Greg's remark. "But then he won't be dead either, which sort of makes up for it." They booked plane tickets for Princeton and visited Kevin again before they flew. "To tell him they're going to make a wired android out of him." Greg sat on the bed while she stood outside. She watched him tapping Kevin's chest, showing how small the device would be, Kevin laughing. Kerstin had been allowed to get up and she stood beside her in the hall, hands folded across her huge stomach.

"Remember when you'd first met Greg," Dani asked her, "and you were trying to convince me later what a bastard he was and that I had no future with him?"

"I don't think that now."

"One thing you said actually made me think, because I was afraid there was some truth in it. You said you hoped I wasn't dreaming of a family with him because he didn't strike you as the kind of man who could love a child." Another burst of laughter fled Kevin's room. "Well, you were wrong."

Kerstin thought about it. "I know."

Home. Princeton was hotter than Pittsburgh. A letter fell out of the junk in her mailbox and she opened it. "Oh my god - I've been accepted!" She hugged him, so happy in the moment that she had to touch him to share it. "I'm going to Los Angeles!" All the way up in the elevator she chattered. The most prestigious invite ensemble in the country. She'd written months before, basically given up on getting an answer. His smile was a death mask. It dawned on her slowly, the tension radiating from him. He couldn't be that selfish.

"You could be happy for me, you know. It's a workshop. It's not like it's forever, Greg."

His face relaxed, the deathly grimace wiped clean. "Then it's not a job?"

"No. Of course not."

And she had to work through the jolt of that one, that he could think she would apply for a job at the other end of the country if it meant having to leave him. As though she could leave him. Burned child. What Stacy had done to him always present, never allowing him to wholly believe in his happiness, in her.

"No, Greg," she repeated. "I'll be back in six weeks."

I'll be coming back to you.

I will always come back to you.

…………………………………………………………………….

End of Chapter 5

(As always, with apologies for medical mistakes)


	6. The Dreams in Which

(Another looong one, but I couldn't see any way to break it up. Thanks for reading.)

Dancers - Chapter 6 (_The Dreams in Which_)

_Once a year, for ten long years, she held a seance, waiting for him to contact her. To speak, or write or morse-tap, the secret words they had agreed on before his death, and then she stopped. Ten years, she told them, was long enough to wait for any man. Thus The Man No Jail Could Hold remained forever trapped by death, never slipping the chains of that last dark prison…_

She shut the book.

Loyalty.

What a concept to measure out in years as Houdini's wife had. As though love extended only so far and no further, ten years enough thank you, time to stop trying. Why stop at all if you loved? Why only once a year, why not a seance every day if you thought the one you loved was trying to communicate with you, screaming, trapped in a dark place…

Sounds in the hall snapped her back. Not him, he wouldn't be back for hours. She let the library book slip to the window seat and gazed out at the August afternoon. Screwy, her thoughts on a hot summer day trawling through New Year's Eve snow, but there it was. She'd suppressed the memory so successfully for months, never letting it raise its disturbing little head, but it had come back unbidden in the past weeks. That moment at the party, the second-long flash, standing with Georg, when the world had seemed to blink as though she passed through a bottleneck into some other space, something red and hot plowing across her chest, pain crushing her leg, biting to the bone – and once back from L.A. she had begun to read up on telepathy. Which led, by ways she was no longer sure of, to a trite library book about Houdini.

Ten years. The sun on her cheek through the glass felt as warm as though his hand cupped it. They had had only a single year so far, the date she had first rung his bell at midnight passing – in the hectic of her return from the west coast - without notice by either of them, or so she had thought, until he came in late from the hospital the next night with a bottle of champagne and chided her (with a sparkle in his eyes) for forgetting. ("Celebrating the first time we got our rocks off with one another," he'd commented later as they sat naked on the balcony, the deck chairs low enough to shield them from view, while she ran a toe across his abdomen. "Might that be odd?" "Don't see why," she'd replied.) One year and she was a different person. What would ten be like? Thirty? If Greg were to die tomorrow would she forget him in ten years, a flippant Mrs. Houdini smiling at reporters, saying What the hell. Could you forget someone you'd worked into the very weave of your soul?

Los Angeles had been exhilarating, brilliant dancers alive in the bodily world, reviving her love of what she did, but it had shown her how much she could miss him, the ache – once she'd settled in – centering on conversations with him over the phone or just the sound of his message if she'd been out (Sexy, was her roommate's proclamation upon hearing his voice on the machine). She hadn't thought it would be that strong. Experiences dulled when she couldn't share them with him, triumphs halved and miseries magnified because he wasn't there. And at night she would feel her fingers move on herself almost of their own accord. He had come to visit her on the fourth weekend, so held-back the first day as they went around town that it had thoroughly shocked her; hesitant, as though he thought something might have changed between them, until she went back to his hotel with him in the evening and, when the elevator doors closed behind them, almost crawled up him to kiss him, determined to ravage him if he wasn't going to ravage her. It seemed to break some tremendous wall of tension in him and he could hardly get the key card through the slot fast enough to get her in the room, their love-making so furious she felt she'd been swept away in a flood, drowned in warm water.

Another sound in the hall. The doorbell rang.

She wasn't expecting anyone. She checked the peephole – and caught her breath.

_Block the door with your body_. Instinct, once she opened the door a notch, to wedge into it facing the woman, as though protecting her home from some virulent attack, while her mind skittered down a million paths, wondering what it was about.

"What do you want?" she asked.

Stacy wore jeans and a cotton blouse, not the sophisticated bitch from the one other time she'd seen her (though the eyes still gleamed like dark skanky diamonds), yet somehow worse: the clothes made her younger. More of a rival.

"I'm sorry if I'm disturbing anything, Dani. I know Greg's at work and I wanted to talk to you."

"I don't think –"

Locks on a door across the hall rattled, a neighbor coming out, and not wanting to stand there like a fool while someone she knew stared at them, she opened the door wider, reluctantly, and let Stacy in, closing it after her. They stood looking at each other until the sounds in the hall faded.

"Just what is it you think we could possibly have to talk about?" she asked.

Stacy told her.

--

He had begun to think about the future.

That in itself was wild; he'd stopped thinking in those terms after the infarction, all futures postponed indefinitely, and yet it was back – a sense of life, of being alive, sun and crowds and music. He could be a part of it again. Things went on, because of his tiny dancer. The fact that he would forever be popping pills of some kind, would always pop too many, the dilemma of his pain, which had always been an unbearable situation, its solution constantly postponed into that future unbearable to think of, possibly until he died, while he spent each day simply getting through each day – that was now just a fact of his life with her. Of what was starting to look like a real life. Those days that had hemorraghed into one another - with the pounding certainty of some day leaving him bloodless, unable to move - now flowed into one another instead, growing fuller. All his problems fading into the background, trivial against the thought that Dani would be there in that future, her body yes, but not just that – her smile, a teasing remark. Her way of looking at him that said he was the greatest thing in the world. They were living together for all intents and purposes (and how he loved those purposes). They would have knocked a hole in the wall between their apartments if they could have. He kept putting off suggesting they move into some bigger place together. He wasn't sure why. Marriage – well, that had always been a scary concept. Who needed it when you were happy anyway? And children? (now there was a thought!) She had seemed so astonished at how he'd taken to Kevin, as though hating people meant he was a child-hater too ("Kids are okay," he'd told her, "if you catch them before they grow up. They're truth-sayers, little scientists. Their curiosity hasn't been anesthetized yet by the adult world.") That thought, the realization that he could have more than just a career and a girlfriend, that he might be on the brink of getting what others considered a life, left him giddy. And feeling stupid of course. It was a crock. What did it mean? Sometimes he almost knew how it might feel to go out the door in the morning with a mushy kiss still glistening on his cheek from his two-year old, but then some other thought would intrude, he would see himself refilling his Vicodin into child-proof bottles and it would bring him back to earth. Life like that would never be his. And yet the warmth remained, his body reacting to the thoughts even when he rejected them, so that he would start from a reverie, staring into space, finding that his mind had been repeating one word as though it were witness to a miracle, a little cry of wonder, love love _love_ (though he never said it to her, always planning to, the word never seeming to fit through his throat).

And in the evenings, like now, when she wasn't dancing, and time stretched before them. She'd cooked something, it was in the oven. They moved around her kitchen in relative silence, their own kind of dance, while he poured himself a drink and she made a salad, one of her healthy specialties that appeared to consist of nothing except birdseed and walnut oil and which he hated. He smiled, watching her. She seemed tense and he moved behind her to massage her neck, stroking the back of his knuckles and then his lips across the hollow there, one of the sweet spots on her so beautiful he could never put it in words. She turned, still tense. Her eyes were dark.

"Greg, I need to ask you something."

He leaned against the counter. "Shoot."

A pause, strange. "Did you sleep with Stacy?"

He held her gaze. "You know I did, I told you –"

"I don't mean when she was working here. I mean, while I was in L.A. Did you?"

Probably the way a heart attack felt at first, clenched, the slow burn. "Dani, what is this about?"

"Stacy was here today –"

"Oh good god." He made it an explosion, just defuse it, but her eyes didn't change. "Stacy's a bitch, Dani –"

"She said the two of you had been going out regularly to dinner and then – when I was out of town – it happened, that you went back to her place. I told her to get out, but she was so sure of herself. Greg, I have to know the truth."

"The truth is that – yes – we've gone out to dinner a few times." The little confession altered nothing in her expression, the crushed line of her mouth. He felt cold now, scared. "I'm sorry. I should have told you."

"It all sounded so plausible – she said I'd probably noticed some change in your behavior and I _did_ – you were so weird in L.A. –"

"Hello? Since when do you let people put suggestions in your mind like that, Dani? Who are you and what have you done with my intelligent girlfriend?" She was still staring, hardened; a brick wall would have looked softer. "You know perfectly well Stacy would say anything to drive a wedge between us –"

"No, I don't know that. Why would she? She left you. Now she suddenly wants back in? Maybe because you encouraged her by meeting her secretly for months?"

"I told you I was sorry about that. Would you just calm down?"

But she was calm. Calm and hard, her eyes like a concrete dam, holding back a world of tears but dry as stone, scorched. "You're so good, Greg," she murmured, and he felt confused, was this her believing him? "You're _so_ good." (Oh no not belief). "But not good enough. Because you made one mistake." (Not a dam or a brick wall – the eyes of an executioner.) "You didn't answer my question. You didn't just come out and answer it."

Meet her gaze. "_No, I did not sleep with Stacy!_ Not while you were in L.A. Not since I've known you. _Okay?_" His get-loud tactic, always a show-stopper because he had the voice for it, just blow 'em out of the room.

It had no effect on her at all.

"I need the truth, Greg." She touched his hand on the counter and it sent a shock-wave through him. "I can take it. We'll – get through it together, somehow. I just don't want a lie hanging over our heads. Please. I'm just asking you for honesty. Total honesty."

And something clicked inside, as he gazed into her wide-open eyes; she was his A-plus student, she really could take it, they'd take every hurdle together in that brave new future and it would start with him being honest. Click. "It was one time," he informed her (relief flooding through him, a weight from his chest). "You'd been gone for weeks and – well, I don't know why it happened. But it's not going to happen again."

Then he saw what a horrible mistake he'd made.

She'd fooled him.

Tricked him into revealing his cards with what he realized in retrospect was the best poker face he would ever see. The crap about honesty had been to get the truth out of him. She really hadn't been sure up to then. He might have gone on bluffing his way through to the end of a long life with her.

But now it was too late.

She was backing away from him, both hands over her mouth. Little sounds were coming out of her. He tried to approach her and the sounds became a screech: "_Don't come near me!_" Then they were both shrieking at once, words so inlaid he wasn't sure which were his, only that he had to make her see the one real truth, that sleeping with his ex hadn't meant anything; when he could hear himself he was yelling _Nothing! Nothing!_ saying her name like a mantra while she batted his outstretched hand away.

" – if there was one thing that was _always_ right, Greg, it was the sex! Always! I gave you _everything_ – you couldn't have needed more –" (and she was right, the sex was everything, though he pretended otherwise to the world, playing it down with lewd jokes so no one would guess how much physical intimacy meant to him, she made it everything, and it shut him up). "But that's not what it was about, was it? Oh god, if it had been a hooker, I would understand. I know your physical needs. But this is about still being in love with her –"

"_No!_" If he could only make her see – what? "I'm not in love with Stacy. You've got to believe that. I knew before we were even finished that it wasn't going to happen again. It was like trying to…grab back the past for a night, I don't even know why I needed to, you were gone, I was unsure of you – I'm always unsure of you, Dani -" He meant it as a compliment, an acknowledgement of how easily she could do better than him, that she was a ten whereas he wasn't even on the same scale (that he had asked himself if she'd started thinking of the same future he had, and if she hadn't how scary was that?)

"Unsure of _me_?" She looked emptied. The dam broken, floodwater receded. "I was gone? Is that the way it is with you: out of sight, out of mind? Is it that simple? Oh god I can't look at you, I have to get out of here…"

It was like a punch in the stomach. She stopped in the living room to retrieve her knapsack and it gave him time to grab his cane from the chair and rush after her. He kept talking, because talking was his strength, that and sheer head-banging stubbornness, and he would use them both, not even trying to argue, just repeating words to her, key-note speech time, folks, please note the bullet points _Mistake_ and _Never again_, but his audience wasn't listening, too busy rooting through their bags for their keys, wiping tears from their face, they would get up and leave any minute and he wouldn't have a second chance, audiences so fickle when you were speechless, fighting for your life –

_Find one honest thing_. "This is about you," he told her.

She stopped at the door and stared. "Me? You _fucked_ your ex-girlfriend, Greg! You took your clothes off and then you took her clothes off and you _stuck it in her_!" She was hysterical again. He couldn't do anything right. "You've known since last spring how upset Stacy makes me and now you try to tell me it was _about_ me? If you'd thought about me you would have stopped. Tell me, Greg, did you think about me? Just once? While you were taking your shoes off – " she was sobbing again now – "or stroking her hair? Did you think about me at all?"

He stared at the floor. "Apparently not." It was a statement of fact, nothing more. An admission of his shame.

She slapped him.

Hard. Staggered him where he had stood off-balance on his leg. And staggered his mind. He could only stare. Stare at her bent doubled over now, clutching her stomach, too breathless to even cry anymore, her mouth an O of pain.

"I didn't mean it that way," he choked out.

It scared him worse than her anger. He'd dished out enough crap during their year together and she had always taken it like a boxer. To see her doubled over now like that, her gasping sobs…it reminded him of something, a memory, instantly repressed again. You didn't forgive someone who hurt you that bad.

Her face was red in odd patterns, as though she was the one had been slapped hard everywhere – cheeks, forehead, mouth. She whirled, threw open the door - and he slammed it shut with his cane. "You're not going anywhere," he told her. It was the macho posturing he knew she had a weakness for, the last thing he could think of, a hand slapped down on a table _Come over here_. It didn't work. She tugged at the knob while he kept the cane firm across the door.

"Let me out!"

"I'm not letting you go off and brood on the wrong version of things. You're going to listen to me."

"Please just let me go, Greg."

And he talked again, loud, badgering, looking for more words, knowing it was too late for words, that there weren't any left, what could you say when you'd been the worst ass you'd ever been in your life? (_I slept with my ex because I was thinking of proposing to you_). She was saying something too, the same thing over and over, that he had to let her walk out the door, that she would come back when they were both calm, that he had to trust that; it was like a litany sobbed out below his own swelling voice, _please Greg please_, and he _couldn't_, didn't she see that, a physical impossibility; even if his brain had wanted to, he couldn't have moved his arm from the door if it meant watching her go off to make up her own mind without any more input from him, a mind so hurt it could only come back with a result of Auf Wiedersehen (and that would surely kill him). No, he had to fight for this. For her. Better to keep banging his head against that anger until she listened.

_Talk_. "I needed to find out something, Dani, and I did – that there's nothing there with Stacy anymore it was just bodies there's sex and then there's sex, right? -" (oh that tremor, her head leaning on the door, quiet again: she knew what he meant). "You have to believe me." _You have to._

She gave up on the door and moved back to the middle of the room. He followed. She was repeating her litany again, earnest, almost calm now, and so intense. For a second he listened. "I'm asking you to do one thing, Greg." Her voice was numb; it sounded taped. "For once, I'm asking you to do something you don't want to do, just for my sake. I need time to think. Let me walk out that door and make my own decision about this." So intense.

"_No!_ You're not leaving here till _you _accept what _I'm_ saying -"

He should have seen it. The reason she'd maneuvered him to the middle of the room, out of reach of the sofa, any support.

She grabbed his cane – so unexpected that it twisted from his hand – and threw it across the room, leaving him high and dry, then she spun for the door.

Treating him like a dog. Fetch, boy.

With a lunge he knew he'd regret for days he thrust his right leg out (pain everywhere, bursting in his head) and cut between her and the door. He had his hands on her, but it was slippery time again - she feinted to the side, seeing her way blocked, a chased animal, and plunged back toward the bedroom. His fingers caught at her blouse and the flimsy crap tore at the shoulder. He hadn't meant that; it was like a parody of violence (but no, not violence) and for a second they were looking into each other's eyes, as though stung by the same thought - _when did it get this crazy?_ - then she ran into the bedroom.

By the time he stomped after her, every step agony, she'd slammed the bathroom door. He heard a click.

"No! Tell me you did not _lock yourself in the bathroom_!"

He rattled the knob, started beating his fists on the door. He didn't know what he was shouting anymore. Noise, curses mostly, loud enough to wake the brain-dead neighbors: _godammit_ and _talk to me!_ He had to get in, not because he thought she might do something to herself, but because he had to see her face. He had to shake her (shake the awful fear inside him) and tell her to stop being stupid.

He'd break the door down.

The lock was a simple privacy set. One good kick would do it.

One good kick.

He turned, searching. The armchair. If he could drag it to the door, he could sit on the arm to take his weight and kick with his left leg. He got behind the chair and shoved, and suddenly the absurdity of it hit him. Like watching a video of yourself in one of those character-building seminars, shadows in an unexpected mirror, an angle you'd never noticed, illuminating: a cripple, a bumbling fool just this side of old, heaving at a chair.

All the impetus left him, swallowed up in hate of himself. Only his hands still moved, shaking. He sank into the seat and watched the bathroom.

When the dark came, he got up and turned on a lamp. He heard her move behind the door. He retrieved his cane and sat back down to wait.

Much later he caught a funny whiff from the kitchen, went and turned the oven off on something crisp and black, and sat back down to wait.

She came to him finally, lifting her shirt to brush her nipples against his chest, her lips on his, and he was so happy, she still loved him, then a sound woke him.

The bathroom door was open. He struggled into the living room, damning himself for falling asleep, and was in time to see the back of her slipping out the front door. He called her name. The clock on the wall said eleven-thirty; they'd played cat-and-mouse for four hours. He stood listening to her footsteps run down the stairs, then to the silence of the empty apartment, the tic-toc of time.

--

Dark always turns into light, the optimist's cant, and here it was: the night became a morning. The sun came up. Shouldn't have. Breakfast was nothing, his stomach not up to it once he peeked at the black crusted thing in the oven, cold and glistening now, almost alien. Then it was up and out, off to work, where he wouldn't have to think. In the parking lot he heard someone behind him yell, "You're breaking up!" and he turned to stare at whoever had guessed this truth about them, but it was only a doctor talking to the dropped connection on his cell phone, which would have been comical if it didn't prove how scared shitless he was. He'd had his own battle with the phone, starting at six a.m., running his fingers over the buttons, telling himself he wouldn't and then calling her cell phone anyway, leaving messages. After he reached his office, he checked his Outgoing and found he'd called her fifteen times. Since six o'clock. He couldn't remember what he'd said, though he had the notion he hadn't spoken at all several times, just listened to her taped voice and then let the time run until it beeped off. The ducklings were in a dither about some case, their livers were failing, no, the patient's was, and he could guess where she'd gone. Cyndi was her best friend, and since he'd been to a party with Dani at her apartment he could probably find it again, or call the theater for the address, but what if he had Gay-Org on the line? (What if she'd _gone_ to Gay-Org?)

"You have less than twenty-four hours to come up with something, House." And what did Foreman know about it? He realized they were talking about the case. "The wild thing about this is that he's exhibiting stiff-man syndrome –" _No he wasn't_.

"You'd think _you_ at least could be politically correct," Cameron snapped at Foreman. "It's stiff-_person_ syndrome."

Whenever he could think straight, he'd tried to dissect why he'd slept with Stacy. He'd have to put it in words for Dani at some point, thought-out words (if she ever gave him that chance), not the stammered excuses of the night before. It was like his reasons for keeping the photo, a grasp at the man he'd been with Stacy, the one who had never worried about revealing his entire self out of fear of driving her away (which was what he always feared with Dani, always hiding his worst side), but he'd found, there in bed with his ex, that that man was gone forever. The old feelings were an illusion. He was a burned child, who would never be completely himself with anyone again. To remember who he'd been or to forget – both hurt just the same. It had taken being in bed again with Stacy to understand that, but at least forgetting meant he could start over. The realization had left him free to choose what he really wanted, and that was Dani, the fear of plunging into a future, maybe even marriage, with her that had driven him to this one last stand suddenly gone; the image of Stacy and their love that had always been a bright shining thing in his head crumpling to ash and blowing away before he had even rolled off her.

Thinking of Stacy now left nothing: bile, a stone in his gut (oh if Dani could only look in his head and see that). He could never have conceived of himself wanting to hit a woman, but now he imagined himself going to Stacy's place and slapping her hard one time, the way Dani had slapped him -

"House? _House_?" A hand waved in his face. It was Wilson. The ducklings were gone. "Cameron came and asked for my help. She said you were practically comatose. You realize you have a patient dying, don't you?" _Something else dying here, dude, give me a break_. Wilson studied his face. "Did you and Dani have a fight or what?"

A good doctor knew his patient. "Do the words World War Three mean anything to you?" He shrugged. "She left late last night. I haven't heard from her since."

"What did you do this time?"

"Funny you should assume _I_ did something wrong." He couldn't meet his eyes. "When Dani was in L.A." - shame caught at his throat - "I - slept with Stacy. Stacy paid her a visit yesterday and told her."

The silence made him look up. That kind of revelation would normally have given the good doctor a serious case of fish-mouth, but Wilson wasn't sputtering and stuttering his disbelief. Not the are-you-insane bug eyes, nor the why-am-I-surprised-at-this-shenanigan shrug. His only concession to shock was to sit down. His look said he was truly reassessing him, seeing for the first time that there was – in the end – no hope for him, just shaking his head softly, suddenly on the outside of the cage bars gazing in at that animal whose behavior actual humans would never penetrate. His lips were a thin grim line. "I guess this means Dani will leave you now."

Putting it in words. Dread cascaded through him. He felt feverish.

"Then help me, dammit!"

"Me? I'm not the one who couldn't keep his dick in his pants. I can't make it unhappen."

"You could talk to her. If she sees your number she might pick up." He grabbed a pen. His hands were shaking again. "This is her cell –"

"What do you expect me to say? Now you two kiss and make up…? Or maybe: hey, you know House, Dani, always jerking people around, but you gotta love him -"

"You're good with death." It froze him. "And that's what this is like. You're good at giving people hope, making them think they can go on when they can't. You'll think of something."

After a moment's hesitation, Wilson took the number. "Then let me handle it," he said. "Stay in the wings, for once, for chrissake."

He watched him walk off. Maybe the little guy would come through for him. Maybe not. Dark into light.

--

"He's sitting across from you, isn't he?"

"No, Dani." She'd told him she was only returning the call because it was him. Her voice was so different it shocked him. Some lilt was gone. "You don't have to see him. I promise he won't follow me. Just tell me where I can meet you."

She finally named a cafe, all the way across town, and he cancelled his afternoon appointments, all of them serious cases that didn't bear being put off.

The cafe had wide windows shaded by willow oaks. As he stepped from his car, he spied Dani through the glass, sitting at a table, her hands around a coffee cup, straight-spined as always, with a dancer's perfection, yet looking tired. She hadn't seen him. He was abruptly reminded of a moment from months ago. The two of them had been left alone together in a restaurant while House went outside to shout into his phone at Chase, and he had asked her what she saw in him. Not drunk like at Christmas, or trying to put House down, just one guy wanting to know how the other guy did it, what was his secret, and she'd begun to talk about the sex, very open (almost as though he were a woman, he had realized). "Greg always gives me the feeling that he's so…" She had groped for words. "Well, 'grateful' is the wrong word – so _happy_ about what I make him feel, so...overjoyed, over_whelmed_. It's like – okay, poetic time, sorry – like we're celebrating a miracle. My body is a church… Other times he just takes what he needs, like he's gone a little crazy, and that's okay too. You can't imagine how satisfying that is to a woman, either way. To know you can make a man lose himself like that… It's so – _meaningful_ to him." She had smiled at him. "And not something you can fake." He remembered thinking it said more about what the sex meant for her than it did about House.

And then he was standing over the table. Her eyes were puffy. He had planned to open with" You're not going to leave him, are you?" but when he saw her face, it came out, "You're going to leave him, aren't you?" She didn't answer.

The waiter brought him coffee.

She told him a little about the evening and he could hear the voices, imagine the gestures that just skirted the edge of violence. He watched her face while she spoke, the full mouth and little upturned nose with its scattering of freckles. The attraction he always repressed for House's sake was just a law of nature no man could have fought. She really was stunning. Only today the eyes didn't fit. Red-rimmed, dead.

"I begged him to let me leave," she was saying. "And he just wouldn't. He actually thought he could browbeat me into forgiving him." At the next table laughter exploded. She clutched her cup. "I asked him to do that one thing, for my sake. To be mature, give me time to make a decision and then respect that decision. But he didn't. He chased me into the bathroom instead and sat at the door for hours. What does that say about how he sees me?"

"It says he's crazy about you. It means he was half-insane with the thought of losing you." She didn't reply. "Dani, you've – changed him so much. I know you know him better than all of us by now, but you don't know…what he was like before you came along. How bad it was. He was at the end of his rope. H was at the end of everybody's rope." The look she gave him seemed almost bored. He told himself he was imagining it. "We were all ready to shoot him just to put us out of his misery." He paused for effect. "He _needs_ you. So badly."

"Stop right there, James, and look at what you're doing. What the two of you are doing. I'm the wronged one here, he slept with his ex-girlfriend, and with your help he is managing to make it _about him_. _His_ needs. How miserable _he_ will be when I leave him." He winced at the word _when_ and saw her notice it. "It's always about him. And I've come to realize – _it always will be_. That would be my life if I stayed with him. Always his problems, the next crisis. I don't want that life. I want him to have thought about me and not gone home with Stacy. I want -" Tears had started in her eyes. "I want it to be about me, just sometimes. It's not too egotistic to want that, is it?"

She was so right it stunned him. He could feel himself winding down, at a loss for arguments in the face of her logic. In her eyes he saw a hardness he knew from terminal patients who had decided to forgo any more treatments, diamond-tough resolve, knowing he wouldn't change their mind, mixed with a kind of pity for him, because they had reached a place he couldn't understand.

"He loves you," he told her. The only argument left.

Her little shrug said a lot. "I know he does. Did you know, he's never said it? The words 'I love you.' In an entire year. Oh, he's said 'I need you.' Such a nice, all-purpose word. Covers a multitude of emotions, at least for him. I tried to trick him once into saying it, talking about how women need to hear certain things now and then even if men weren't big talkers, and you know what he came up with?" She took a breath and did a passable imitation of Greg House at his most ironic: "'You need me to tell you I'm nuts about you? If you haven't noticed that yourself, we should get your head checked.'"

It made him itch with embarrassment for his friend. How could someone so brilliant be so stupid? "He does love you," he repeated. "Ask anyone who watches him when he's with you." Realizing too late what it revealed about himself.

"Let me tell you a story," she said. "This happened months ago. He may have mentioned it to you, but I doubt it. We were driving home down Prospect and we saw a little girl dart out on her bike and get hit by a car. I was still in shock while he was pulling over and telling me to get his bag out of the trunk. When I got to him there, the girl was on her back just flailing and screaming – well, it turned out later she only had a broken leg and a bad concussion, but it looked _horrible_, the back of her head was swimming in this pool of blood. Her mother was screaming at the driver, which was scaring the girl even more, and Greg told me to try and calm the mom down. Of course he didn't say that, he sort of growled 'Shut that bitch up!' I got the mother to quiet down, but the little girl was hysterical by then. Greg couldn't even touch her or get this blanket under her head that someone had brought, she kept twisting and hitting at him. Then he took out his wallet. You could just feel the crowd wondering what in the world a doctor could have in his wallet that would help this girl. Then he took out a quarter – and started doing magic tricks with it. You know, palming it and pulling it out of her ear, that kind of thing, keeping up this running monologue all the time like a stage magician. The crowd got _deathly_ quiet. You just knew they thought he was insane. But the thing was – the girl calmed down. She wasn't laughing or anything, but she watched the coin and stopped grinding her head in all that blood and gravel and he was able to examine her with his other hand. I don't know, maybe she just thought he was crazy too. The point being – perhaps that's not so unusual for a doctor, to pull off something like that, but the fact is that he can be that way when he wants to be or has to be, but he doesn't. He _chooses_ the path of browbeating and ranting. Last night, when he kept talking at me, yelling… He didn't even want to hear what I had to say if it wasn't what he wanted to hear."

"The pit-bull."

She glanced up, and nodded. "And maybe that works for him in his job. But not in relationships."

And that was that. They sat for a while longer, saying little. He could at least pay for her coffee. The waiter looked at her and gave him a dirty look, as though he figured he was the one making this beautiful woman unhappy. Before they rose to go she said another thing.

"You know, Greg is always telling me I let men walk on me. And maybe he's right. But he's done it to me a lot too, in his own way, and it just turns out that it's him it's going to stop with. I can't sacrifice my ego any longer for his." He nodded. "Would you tell him that for me, James? Would you try to make it clear to him?"

--

He found House out on his office balcony, his thinking place. He was flicking one of his yo-yos, holding it out across the railing he leaned against. The ducklings had scattered at Wilson's gesture.

"It looks like she's going to leave you," he informed him. "She says she's coming back to the apartment this evening to tell you in person."

The doctor nodded. The yo-yo spun, up and down again, and as it reached the end of its string, he saw him slip the loop from his finger (the shock of the simple gesture stunning him) and the yo-yo just kept on going, while House leaned over the rail a little to watch it plummet into the depths. He shrugged and finally spoke. "A year. Think that might qualify as a personal best for me? Aside from Stacy, I mean?"

"Oh good god. You can't really be pretending this doesn't matter to you. You think you're not going to miss her?"

"She gives great head. I'll miss that –"

"Oh _shut up_!" It startled them both. House looked up and he saw how bad it really was. "All your bravado doesn't mean a thing. You're going to fall to pieces when she leaves." He saw him twinge at the word _when_, the same way he had done when Dani said it. "You just went too far. I don't know what goes on in your head. You know what Dani told me? That you never once said 'I love you' to her." He watched some fleeting pain cross House's face. "She's doing this for her own self-respect. Can't you honor that with a little seriousness?"

"She's doing this because she failed." _Failed?_ "She could have chosen to stay. Could still choose to stay, and if she doesn't - well, she's not any better than Stacy. Loyalty, I guess, is a scarce commodity."

"Is that a joke! What about your loyalty? What do you _expect_? You think there's someone out there who'll accept _anything _from you? That you can just completely be your own true - godawful - self and that some woman - especially one like Dani, with a whole slew of other options - will just knuckle under and take it? Maybe your imbecilic masochist, sure –"

The tension in House burst. He spun abruptly, shouting. "Yes - _yes!_ Why not, goddamit it? What's the point of saying words like love if you don't accept a person the way they are, with everything that entails?" He could only stare. "The fact remains that Dani's giving up. On me. Has given up, if what you say is true." The energy seemed to leave him. "Whatever she felt for me, it just…wasn't strong enough."

_Strong enough_. He knew he was sputtering again. "Wasn't - ? Are you truly that relationship-challenged? People won't keep accepting the worst from you forever. No one would." Far down, in the chasm beyond the balcony, a bell rang on the Catholic school across the way, and children poured forth; their distant screams might have been laughter or pain. "It's almost like you do these things deliberately to test people."

And there it was. Understanding. Like a bell ringing, doors behind doors, slamming open. He _did_ know what went on in the guy's head. "You _do_, don't you?" he said. House looked away, scared. "Maybe it's deliberate, maybe its unconscious half the time. _That's_ why you screwed Stacy, even if you don't know it yourself – it was some unconscious test of Dani. You're – you're looking for something. And it's something that _doesn't exist_." He was babbling to himself now, so overcome with insight that he pounded the rail with his palm. "You're not crass or unromantic like everyone thinks - you're the most romantic person there ever was! Because you - Gregory House - truly believe in unconditional love!"

It had become a harangue but he didn't care, House's numb look couldn't stop him he _had_ it at last!

"Something every grown person in the world knows doesn't exist outside of fairy tales, and you - you've been beating yourself up all your life because you couldn't find it! Mommy and daddy were the first to let you down. Especially daddy - he just couldn't love you for what you were, right? Then it was Stacy – boy, she failed her test with flying colors, didn't she? Now you figure Dani's just not up to taking your crap. Not 'strong' enough to love you the way you want to be loved. And you're right… Because, you know what - _no one_ would be. Love isn't like that - it's not, hey, take whatever I dish out and it'll prove you love me. The other person has to get something. Love is always give and take."

"Then what are _you_ still doing here?"

It knocked the breath out of him. For a moment they stood silent, the shouts from the playground rising to them, sounding tortured. No one, man or woman, could be so hard inside.

"I don't know," he finally murmured. "I don't know – leaving, I guess." At the door he turned. "Say hi to Dani for me tonight." Then a last dig, the need to hurt back. He could play that game. "Tell her she's doing the right thing."

--

He had changed so much in a year.

And there lay his old life, waiting for him. Like falling back into a pit. The need to turn on every electrical device, as he did now, the moment he walked in – lights, TV, radio – especially those that would talk to him, anything to banish the silence. He'd stood downstairs in the entrance to the apartment building and stared at the open elevator door so long that it had closed again, and then he'd climbed the stairs, so that he was sweating with pain by the time he reached the top. It hadn't made the apartment different.

Yes, his life. Waiting for him, like an old, very evil friend.

He waited for evening, for the sound of her. Wilson had said she would come. Stupid thoughts crossed his mind: he would work furiously for the few hours left and change the place, clean it to perfection, toss things out, all his porn videos, the juvenile guitars on the wall – impress her so much with his commitment to change that it would persuade her to stay. He got as far as placing some dishes in soapy water and then collapsed into a chair, exhausted by nothing. Dark came. The dread in his stomach made him almost sick. Like a patient must feel, he suddenly knew, waiting for a heart procedure he likely wouldn't survive.

Then the doorbell was ringing.

Couldn't be her, making him open the door as though she were already a stranger, but it was, and it was so much like the first time she'd rung his bell at midnight that he couldn't look at her, just a quick glance at the swollen face that attested to a night of crying, _turn away_. He gazed at a corner of the room, facing away from her, while she closed the door behind her and began.

"You - um - once told me not to bolt and so I'm not." Her voice sounded scratchy. "It's only right that I come here in person to tell you I'm leaving you."

Silence. He listened to her breathe.

"You know, Greg, in – in the beginning, when I first realized I had started to hang on your approval, that everything centered around you, I was frightened sometimes. It was like I had stepped one foot off over an abyss. I was dependent on someone else for my happiness. But then I saw you were holding me up and it was okay. But now... Now I see you weren't holding me up. You were just propping yourself up. And now I'm falling." A breath, small and resolute. "I've got to save myself."

Nothing to say to that.

"Last night was when I saw it. You just couldn't accept that my opinion might be different from yours. If sleeping with Stacy hadn't meant anything to you, then it just _couldn't_ mean anything to me either. As though I didn't exist outside of you." (Of course she didn't, or he didn't outside of her, were those the words he needed, the ones he hadn't found?) "I had always known you used me for your needs, Greg, but I always thought we were equals, that somewhere in there you respected my thoughts. Because of Stacy I know now all you respected with me were your needs. Physical, emotional. What I needed didn't matter. And then –" the breath was a little sob – "then I asked you to do one thing for my sake, to let me walk out and decide for myself. And you wouldn't do that either. So damn…_stubborn_. I was just something for you to keep – pushing against. Not a person in my own right, who could make up my own mind."

So his stubbornness – chasing her, not about to give up, the relentlessness that meant how much he cared, hours at the bathroom door – that was what had done it. _I didn't know_, he thought. He thought, _I'd give you anything, if I knew what was right_.

The irony of it made him want to laugh or cry, and a little snort escaped his throat. He felt her go stiff beside him.

"I'm sure Wilson told you all this. There's one thing I didn't mention to him. When you – when I was in the bathroom and you were pounding on the door, I…had a vision. Nothing supernatural. Just a premonition, I guess you'd call it. I saw the future. In this vision I was lying on my deathbed. I'd spent my life with you, and I'd been happy and now I was dying, some room, everything was dark, and I was so scared. It hurt. And you - you were yelling at me. Telling me I couldn't die and leave you alone, because what would you do, you shouted at people in the shadows, how could they have let it happen, why didn't they do something. It was all about how horrible it was going to be for you, when what I needed was for you to take me in your arms, to help me through it with your strength. But you couldn't. And the me in the vision realized that I'd always deluded myself about being happy, that it had been a ruined, wasted life, chasing after little scraps of the real you that you would throw me now and then. Thinking that you were giving when all you'd ever done was take. And then I died. Knowing in the last second, with this horrible bitter sense, that I'd wasted my life on someone who had … needed, but never really cared." She was crying, very softly, but he wouldn't look, no, the cluttered desk over there might walk off, keep your eyes on it. The fact that she'd talked for five minutes and he hadn't glanced her way once, that he didn't know what she had on, surely not the ripped blouse, whether her hair was messed up…it would make it easier to obliterate it all later, no last lingering looks please, stupid romantic crap anyway, and god no begging he could manage that at least -

"Are you going to look at me at all?" Her voice so strange.

He had to clear his throat. "Probably not." (Like a baby being strangled. Or an old man, no breath left).

He sensed her mouth open and close, more shock. Something else had just been proven.

And then she was talking about her apartment, she would find a new place, get friends to move her things out. His heart hurt. This was it then, the surgery could never have worked. Hadn't worked that time, New Year's, when he'd thought he could just cut her out of him, and how much harder now, when her roots had grown so deep, down to the aorta, he supposed. Her words were like little stabs of a scalpel, some talk about him not trying to contact her, all designed to make it very clear that once she walked out the door she would be dead to him forever. He couldn't concentrate.

"…and they can come by and get anything I've left. So we won't ever have to see each other again. It will be easier for both of us." The desk, that chair, the feel of his cane against his thigh, his hands clenched. _Don't look_. "I guess there's nothing left to say. Except – goodbye."

Silence so long he thought he'd gone deaf. Then she was turning to the door, and there had to be words, hadn't he had come up with something while he'd waited for this, sick with it all day, knowing it would come out and here it was, as he turned to her at last, but so loud, a violence, not the way he'd ever wanted it to be: an ugly cough, shouted, like blood and vomit, his deepest fluids.

"_I - love - you!"_

Time stopped (he could still do that). She leaned her head on the door. "Wilson told you to say that."

"_So what! I mean it!_"

When she turned her voice was a ghost's. "It's too late, Greg. It's not enough. It's all part of the same thing. Your needs. _You_ love me and so how can I possibly leave you?" She held his gaze, all the dark shining tears spilling, and her voice broke. "You should have said it earlier, some time when you didn't have to."

No one could be that hard. So there was nothing to say that would prove to her it wasn't about his pain. Because it was. It filled up the world, inescapable. His mind fumbling through words, rejecting, _don't do this I need you you can't leave me here alone in the dark._ "What do you want me to do?" he asked.

"There isn't anything, Greg."

"Do you want me to get down on my knees?"

She gave him her just-stop-it look, tear-filled, already turning to the door. He tossed his cane aside.

He got down on his knees.

Begging after all. Like an open wound might beg to be healed, execution posture and she could hit him or kick him now if she wanted, it would be all right if it only meant she was touching him. Instead she was staring, horrified, both hands over her mouth; her look said she couldn't have been more repulsed if he'd laid a mangled animal at her feet (and hadn't he?), then a choked sound came out of her; she turned and ran, his hand snatching at air as the door slammed behind her.

--

She couldn't see.

She was a blind woman, running down the stairs, slowing on the sidewalk to grope her way while streetlamps popped on in the dusk. Her tears crystallized the lights, too hard to look at. Faces loomed at her, staring at this woman sobbing as she stumbled by. She didn't care. She had to put distance between herself and the apartment or she would run back and take him in her arms, her hurt little boy, and tell him she forgave him.

Because she did.

She thought she'd cried enough tears, but there were years more in her, she knew now, she would be crying all her life, that future cut off since the moment she'd seen the truth. Oh, she really hadn't been sure, Stacy's smug grin might have been a lie, but then he'd admitted it. So simple for her to trick the trickster, and she'd seen in his face what was impossible for her to conceive: that he thought he was doing _good_ by confessing; _he_ was relieved to get it off his chest, no doubt about it, and then his "I'm sorry, it won't happen again," so overly simple, as though he'd gone shopping for her and brought home the wrong toilet paper. She'd started to die then.

A bad dream, from there on in. She was crouched on the floor of the bathroom, hugging her knees, listening to his rant that seemed to evaporate at some point, and then she was standing in Cyndi's door, after waking her up at midnight, the other dancer's eyes appraising her torn blouse with a knowing grimace, so that she had to explain through her sobs, No, he wasn't like that (thinking to herself, Why would he be, when he had such better ways of hurting her). Wilson's stricken look in the cafe, as in love with Greg House as she was, in his own way. You sent a puppy to run defense for you, she'd wished she could say to Greg then.

And then she was climbing the stairs to see him for the last time, sweat starting on her by the time she reached the top, not from exertion, but from nerves. It was the hardest thing she'd ever done. She'd thought of every possible tack he might take, as she sat on Cyndi's sofa through the night crying until she couldn't breathe: he would argue with her, be rational or irrational, he'd lose it entirely and try to lock her in, tie her to the bed, he'd be bitter-smooth as a snake while he told her to go on get out what did he care he had Stacy anyway. She'd imagined it all, but never that he would stand there and face away, not glancing at her once, saying nothing, letting her pummel him with her little speech until she turned to leave (quickly then before that explosion in her heart when he finally spoke the words could make her throw away her pride and stay).

Then he threw away his pride. Tossed all that dignity aside with his cane, and got down on his knees. No theatrical ploy. His face – oh his face. She'd never known, hadn't thought about that moment in a year, his hand slick with their lovemaking fumbling desperately to wrap her hair across her eyes before he came, a thing he'd never done again after the first time, the insanity of it clear now: that there was a face he had she was never supposed to see. A face he'd kept her blind to, hair still across her eyes all that time, but here it came, as he kneeled in front of her: his real face, and it had been so (oh but it would never affect her love for him) – so…_ugly._ Monstrous, because he was a child with a monstrous need, a need for more love than the entire world could ever give him.

And so she ran from that face, bolting, yes, from the truth that she loved him and forgave him and wanted to be with him, but couldn't. Because she was strong. So strong she had to lean now against a lamppost, wracked with sobs, startled by voices, a brush of her sleeve, two Hispanic boys, fifteen at best, with real concern in their eyes - You need some help miss? – (we all do) - but she only pushed away and ran.

--

Never trust theories.

He had applied dream math - say three words, get everything in return - and it hadn't worked.

Something cold pressed his forehead – the floor. He dragged himself to his feet, ignoring the little scream inside, the drawn-out _no_. He couldn't see straight. Dusk played tricks with the lights he'd switched on earlier, dimming them until only certain spots in the room glowed like liquid: the sofa where she read her books, the bear-rug they'd lain on, seeming now to flow with riverfire. The phone; he would be waiting for a call the rest of his life, so best to yank the jack from the wall now, the quick burst of strength electrifying him, and that was the answer: just keep moving, cover the pain. That glass of scotch, two days old, shattered against the wall perfectly, and there were journals and reams of notes that spun and fluttered when tossed, almost like birds, so beautiful. Why stop there? The computer crashing on the floor scared him. He'd do it right, he decided, you could mirror the world ending by having a room end, so he found some music and slotted it in, something old, the words simple and entirely unbearable. The oaken barrister's cases were next _Keep me searching for a heart of gold _had to climb on a chair for that, use all his weight, but the first to tip over nicked a corner of the piano and filled the floor knee-deep in books, which was satisfying, better than a yo-yo off the balcony, this was really cool. _And I'm gettin' old._ The next bookcase almost jerked him with it, but he caught himself by hopping on his left leg. Time for the guitars. _I wanna give._ The first needed two swings against the piano, but the acoustic just exploded, split down the middle into daggers of wood with a whanging chord he could almost identify. Turning, he slipped in heaps of journals and landed on his back, laughing. _I wanna live_. What a joke. His hand could just reach the stereo cable and he jerked it from the wall. Silence. There was the real answer. Sometimes, when his dad had come for him, punishment immanent, he'd hidden under the bed, the closeness of musty springs a comfort, all quiet but for the approaching steps that always found him. Silence and dark. An answer.

It was an answer that called for careful contemplation.

If he loved even one thing in life (_think of something_) it might hold him back – pistachio ice-cream or the way raindrops ran down a windowpane. The smell of her skin. Yes, he loved that. Gone forever. Twisting on his side on the floor he doubled over at the thought, a tight comma of pain. So that was it.

Wade through books. In the kitchen, a little shocking in that it was still a room, he found another bottle of scotch and then plundered his stashes, from the backs of cabinets, the bottom of the flour bin, going to the bedroom for more – _don't look at the bed_ – until he had enough. Thirty-seven. Wilson had switched him from 10 to 7.5-mg months ago, ignoring his quip that he would just up the ante, so they were all he had. It would do (and ban all thought of Wilson too, just another deserter in the foreign legion of psychos around him pretending to care). Two-hundred seventy milligrams of bitching hydrocodone. This was dream math that would work.

He headed back to the living room.

--

All the corners looked alike. For a moment she panicked, thinking she'd come full circle back to the apartment (her mind could have played that trick), but she was farther than she realized. All that running, then walking, blind, stretching the line leading back to him taut, willing it to break. A bus-stop loomed ahead; that was the answer, get on a bus before the line could pull her back to him. She told herself not to think of what he might be doing and then thought it anyway. Had he gone into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich, pretending normalcy with all the strength in him? Or if she went back now, would she find him still on his knees, not having moved at all?

The thought emptied her and she leaned on the back wall of the bus shelter, blocked from the street's view. The place was deserted, no one to see her cry here. Probably meant a bus wouldn't be along for awhile. If not, she would keep walking, bolting. After a moment to ease her trembling, she went around to the front of the shelter to read the schedule and stopped in her tracks, staring.

In the middle of the street stood a piano.

--

He swept dust and shards of wood from the piano bench and sat down. Best place for it, a _good_ place. The gleaming keys, that had always seemed like a woman's skin and never more so than now, grinned up at him. He set the scotch on the lid and poured a finger into the one unbroken glass he'd found, placed the bowl of pills beside it and scooped a handful. A memory of piano lessons invaded his thoughts, the grandmotherly teacher his mom had found for him, smelling ever so faintly but not unpleasantly of urine, who had placed gumdrops on the keys for him if he could name the notes. He reached out his hand -

--

- and she watched her fingers deposit a pill on each key, starting at high F and moving down. Her fingers in front of her seemed too thick, with fresh scrapes and a bleeding cut on the thumb, and they moved against her will, but she could feel the smooth ivory and lift her other hand to run her knuckles along the grain of the woodwork, warm in the dusk, lit now for two seconds by a car's headlights passing, a horn blaring somewhere far off. Silence again. Her left fist counted out pills onto the keys like a farmer sowing seeds, or a rosary, until she had a line of thirty-seven, then she moved back to the top and started swallowing. The scotch after each pill tasted like –

--

- joy, as warm and sweet as sliding his cock into her, a sip only, to wash each one down and keep it down, it would add up anyway, the yellow lights already dancing at the corners of his eyes, ganglions going to sleep, so he took it slow, hands clammy by the time he got to the last two -

--

- but she got them down, thirty-six, thirty-seven, with a last languid swig straight from the bottle, and swung herself up from the bench. Something was missing, her legs had gone away, a gaping blank where the pain of her right leg had been, that hellish focus of her every waking second, and joy burst inside her oh she was higher than she'd ever been, she would fly, but when she looked down she saw pavement beneath her feet. Which was odd and then he –

--

- fell, long-gone legs just buckling. He was under the bed again, sharp edges of books in his back (where had they come from?) and the steps had reached him, but they were turning away, oh thank jesus, the _clump-clump_ of shoes growing slower and fainter as they receded, no punishment today, he would be spared that forever now. No one would ever find him. When he turned his head he found he lay upon a sea of torn notes and books, an infinite white ocean in the gray light of hulking shapes, over there a piano, dust still settling out of the air from some cataclysm. Then a bus pulled right into his apartment, which was just so cool, as big and fine as a whale, with a dire squeal of brakes, and hissed its doors open for him. He struggled to stand.

--

- squeal of brakes. A rough hand propelled her sideways.

"Didn't you see the bus, lady! What were you doing standing in the middle of the road?" A man's face loomed near. She looked behind her. Where the piano had stood a bus waited, passengers descending and moving away, some gawking interest at their little scenario. _It was there_, she wanted to say. She thought she might crouch and look for wood debris below the bus, but she couldn't find her legs. The man's hand on her arm held her upright. "My legs are gone," she told him, ignoring his narrowing eyes. "My right leg should hurt and it doesn't."

"Miss, have you taken something?"

_Taken something_. Yes. A lot of somethings.

She looked again. No piano, no bus either, for it had pulled away. Only the guy accosting her, frightened now, and further down a tiny wizened man of perhaps eighty, who leaned on his cane and stared. She'd made the old guy miss his bus and she felt sorry for him. Then their eyes met and she came to. Her legs came back, everything awake with the realization.

She had to make him miss his bus.

"_Greg - no!_"

She broke from the man's fist on her arm and ran.

She couldn't have come that far, six, seven blocks back, wild breaths, no pacing just _run_. Then she was taking the stairs for the second time, flying up them, beating on the door screaming his name, fingers fumbling for the key in her pocket. She'd taken it off the chain earlier, planning to give it to him, thank-god forgotten. Inside, she thought she would faint – the wreckage like a scene from a war – her breaths little hot darts in her throat. Slowed by fear, she stepped around the piano.

He lay with his cheek in vomit. The white specks were half-dissolved pills. She was on her knees in them, turning him, then she was seeing the phone cord where it snaked away under junk, no time to excavate, she had her cell phone. A tinny voice asked her questions. Two men were beside her, the old guy and his twenty-something grandson from down the hall, she thought the grandson was called Joey, shouting something about getting his gramp's defibrillator and sprinting back out the wide-open door, but then his head lolled. His chest stopped moving. The last of her rationality drained from her. She screamed "_Is he breathing!_" at the old guy who stood feet away, how should he know, then she was pressing her lips down over his vomit-flecked mouth and blowing in, doing something wrong, she was sure. He'd given her a first-aid lesson once and they'd ended up on the couch naked laughing while she straddled his chest and pushed, that was it. You pushed a heart, shoved until it chose to beat for you again. She would do that. Strong hands yanked her away, ripped his shirt open. Beeps and a shock, then another.

She could hear her voice screaming _No_, her thoughts saying your heart doesn't stop, not yours it goes on and on.

--

...so I knew the two were a couple, you see them in the hall a lot, and then we're coming up and we hear this scream. The door's open, she's like screaming and oh man it looked like a rock band that really had it in for a hotel. Don't know how one person could pull those bookcases down and seeing those guitars wasted, that hurt, then Gramps is saying, Joey get the machine. The guy on the floor's the one who saved him when he had his heart attack in the hallway, got him the defibrillator and taught us how to work it and all, so he likes the guy. When I get back I have to drag the woman off him. I mean I've been around but I never seen _anyone_ lose it like that. The whole time we're shocking him she's screaming - _You Can't Die! _– just kicking her hands and feet on the floor like a kid having a tantrum, except so hard she had to be hurting herself so you knew it was serious. Pretty unfair too, since I figure she's the reason the guy wanted to off himself in the first place. We're on the fourth shock by then. The paramedics only needed one for Gramps that time, so I'm thinking the guy's managed to flush himself down the toilet for good, you know?

--

_Tha-dunk_.

This is the sound of nails in a coffin. A soft hammering, they're closing a lid on him. The bus has left without him, but that's all right, this is more peaceful anyway, tha-dunks growing slower as the lid slides across his vision, blotting thought. Then _tha-dunk_ they stop, and the bottom falls out of the coffin.

Falling fast down a hole, chasing rabbits, his very being shrivelling to just that pinpoint of light above. He can't imagine how he'll get back up the well (the tha-dunks were somehow important in that respect, he seems to remember), but he doesn't want to, the layers through which he plunges ever more comforting the darker and thicker they grow around him, sound gone now, so far down, but for a whir beyond the walls, a muffled scream.

He knows the voice.

She's crying.

_I'm here_, he'd like to say, _at the bottom of this well_. But she won't be comforted. _I'm at peace_. An image of her face comes, laughing at some joke he made. He wants her to laugh again.

He'll go back.

It will make her happy.

Without the tha-dunks to home in on there's no orientation, up and down all one, just that way when you jump off the dare bridge; he'd gone too deep then too, and had panicked just like this before kicking up with all his might through green silence toward the sun. Toward her face.

And with the thought he's propelled upward, tossed back into the stream of light and sound so harsh it's like pain.

_Tha-dunk_.

--

"Got a pulse!" The room seems crowded to her, figures flitting by, near then far, more arriving all the time. They throw shadows across his face, his eyelids fluttering as they all crowd down the stairs, the tiny movement making her so happy, and she wants to reach out and touch his cheek, but she doesn't know where her fingers are. Then: blue light, a hall ending in glass, and she struggles to follow but they won't let her; she wants to be ready to crawl on top of him and breathe into him if they need her to, but they shut her out. They take him away behind the glass where she can't go, and how could she have helped when she can't feel her own fingers. A face bends near hers, Wilson, alarmed, who looks up and catches a signal from the doctor behind the glass, though she can't tell what, then dips back to her, his eyes magnified a hundred times, and then not, as she sinks away from him to the floor. A voice saying Dani, he's going to be all right.

Dani? Hello! I need help over here – she's in shock.

--

"I wondered when this would happen," she told him.

Wilson turned, startled. "Lisa –" Beyond the glass a nurse checked the sleeping form of House. She wondered how such a tall man could be made so small by a hospital bed, so pale and insubstantial.

"I remember when I first met Dani at the Christmas party," she went on. Wilson turned back to the glass as though he didn't want to hear his boss reminisce. "House was keeping his eyes on her like he was afraid she would disappear in smoke any second, but he was off at the bar for a moment, and Brunner - _the_ Brunner from ER, that the nurses get so dreamy over it's endangered the lives of several patients – came up to Dani with some line about how he was sure he'd met her before, but couldn't think where. She just gazed at this male god and said – as naturally as you please: 'We've never met. I would remember.'" Wilson was watching her now. "It was a flirt that wasn't a flirt - she was just being honest - but she knew what she was doing too. Brunner lit up like a California forest fire. I thought right then, This woman's going to have House for breakfast."

"This wasn't her fault." She'd never heard James Wilson growl before. "House did something wrong."

"I'm sure he did."

"Dani was leaving him, but she was justified in doing so."

"I'm sure she was."

The nurse came out and nodded that the patient was doing fine. The shape beneath the sheets stirred, waking up, and a steel band around her heart loosened. Wilson went to the bed and she stood in the door to listen.

"Greg." His friend touched his arm.

House's eyes fluttered open and then closed again. "Can't be heaven when your face is the first thing I see." His throat was scratchy from the stomach pump they had used. "Oh no, I've gone to the bad place."

"You're in the hospital. Obviously recovering well."

Yes, he was still himself. She felt relief flood her. She wondered again, as she so often had, what it was about Greg House, a man whose actions had occasionally threatened the very existence of the hospital she ran, why behavior that should have been infuriating always left her calm, as though she drank strength from it. Why the rare approving look from him made her heart leap. A response in herself that she couldn't understand, though she'd looked at it from every direction except one.

Far down the hall shouts rose. Wilson had told her Dani was sleeping in his office after he'd given her a sedative. The screams came from there.

Wilson was already running past her. House's eyes were wide. "You don't get up," she told him and hurried toward the commotion.

Foreman was holding the slim dancer as she struggled. Dani was screaming obscenities. Papers from the desk had scattered. A lamp broke as they watched. Dani got her feet against the desk edge and shoved, strong enough - in spite of the difference in their size - to propel her and Foreman into the opposite wall. Chase stood by, not helping, worried – she realized with disgust – about touching his boss's girlfriend.

"_None of you are real!_" Dani's scream chilled her. Then Wilson had her in his arms, and she melted to a moaning heap. "He's dead, isn't he?"

"He's awake, Dani," Wilson told her. "I'll take you to him, but not like this." Over her head their eyes met. "I'm going to give you something else to calm you down."

She thrust him away and stood. "You're not going to touch me!" For a second she seemed ready to go psychotic again. She stood straight, trembling, fighting for air as though at the end of a hard dance. "You're not giving me something to take away reality." Resolve replaced the fear in her eyes, some momentous thing happening inside her. "You're going to take me to him. Now."

--

Up toward the light, but instead of her face, it was Wilson, who said something comforting to him – the only bandwidth the good doctor operated on – and then went away. His throat felt as if they'd rammed the Holland Tunnel down it. Then Dani came in, with a look that scared him. Maybe he was dead after all, the afterlife just a constant rush of faces looking down at you in shock. Then she was in his arms. Crushing him so hard it hurt.

"I love you," he whispered, repeating it over and over.

"Greg, are they watching us?"

The question was so weird that he drew back to look in her eyes. Brown gaping holes leading down to terror. A chill brushed him.

"Don't look at them." She put her mouth to his ear. "They're not real."

More than a chill; he was suddenly freezing.

"Wilson tried to give me something," she whispered. "He knew I'd seen through their fake reality and he wanted to make me forget what I'd discovered."

"You're in shock, Dani. Stop this."

"No, Greg._ Listen to me_! Did you tell anyone what you did, _how_ you did it?" He felt lost. He'd traumatized her, driven her over the edge to this, but he was too weak to deal with it now. He wanted to cry. She had her lips close to his ear again, conspiratorially. "Greg, since you woke up, have you told anyone about the piano?"

The piano.

Then she described to him, in detail, what he'd done. Explained about the pills, how he'd counted them out, thirty-seven, one on each white key. About a piano in the middle of a road. The little sips of scotch. Her eyes, when he forced himself to look, were still terrified but they held determination. "No one else could know that, could they?" she asked him. "I couldn't have heard it from anyone else." Her hand on his wrist tightened. "It was telepathy, Greg. I read your mind."

Colder and colder, as though layers were being peeled back from him. Differential diagnosis, find an explanation. "Stimulation of the temporal lobe," he mumbled. "Would make you see and hear things that weren't there." He was shaking, shaking his head and she stopped him with her hands on his cheeks.

"If telepathy's possible, then nothing we believe about the world is true, Greg. Nothing out there is real. _Except us_."

Her worst fear. When had she told him that? So she had had an epileptic hallucination, by chance just after she left the apartment, and it had frightened her, spooked her bad because she was labile that way, and it kept her spouting these insanities, that intense whisper saying something now about how they had to stay together, never leave each other's sight in case the last remnants of what was real blew away on them, in case they lost each other in the nothing, and he could only argue back. So she'd gone a little nuts, Wilson had given her something and she'd reacted paradoxically to it. Logic would save the day. Coincidence explained everything, he told her, talking over her words that grew ever more frantic, his aching throat rasping across explanations. The very thought that he might try to kill himself would have been tumbling around her backbrain, he said, and the pills in a line on the piano keys – well, she knew him so well, her thoughts could have worked like his. He tried to remember if he'd once told her about the gumdrop teacher (_no_). Coincidence – wild improbable chance - explained it all, Dani (_of course it did_), even down to the number thirty-seven, my love my darling. A random number, so undeniably random, that she kept repeating as though it proved something. Dream math, nightmare math.

Yet she'd seen the piano, felt it beneath her fingers. "Until the bus came and it was gone," she finished.

The bus.

He reached up to touch his own cheeks and it felt like someone else's face, a plastic mask down which his tears ran. Through the glass he could see Wilson and Cuddy wearing expressions that said they would have killed their grandmothers to know what Dani was telling him. Their curiosity seemed suddenly menacing.

Dani crawled into the bed and they held each other, pressing close. A nurse came in to tell her she couldn't do that, but left again when she saw his look. "It was still happening when I got to the apartment," she told him after a while, "though I didn't realize it. There was a dark place. You were happy there." _Stop now. Don't say it_. "I know that you came back for my sake, Greg. You did something that you didn't want to do, just for me."

In the corners shadows merged. The nurse had turned the lights down. He had never known dark that frightened him as a child; the dark beneath sheets or beneath a bed was always a comfort, palpable. No, it was the far ends of the room now that disturbed him, the way they fell off into nothing. He held Dani and watched the dark, listened to his quiet desperate voice, the only thing in the world, saying, "You have temporal-lobe epilepsy."

--

End of Chapter 6

Lyrics by Neil Young, Gary Jules


	7. The Blood Beneath Your Skin

(A/N: Yes, 19,000 words. I'm _so_ sorry, I just don't where to break these things up.)

(M rating is for some dark adult imagery, some sex and language.)

Dancers – Chapter 7 (_The Blood Beneath Your Skin_)

"_It happened. I saw it."_

"_What we could do is send you a kit the two of you can use to test yourselves at home. It wouldn't be laboratory conditions. It would be best if you could persuade him to come in with you and we'll –"_

"_He won't do that."_

She would turn while doing some innocuous thing, putting her hair up or closing a window, and catch him looking at her as though she were crazy.

Trauma made them zombies the first few days after the hospital. They stayed in her apartment, speaking little, doing less, and yet they would fall into bed at night exhausted as though they had run for miles, and wake up in the morning still in their clothes. Nights in which she woke often, panic making her heart race, and would bend near him in the dark to check his breathing, one time to find him staring back as his eyes were illuminated by a passing car. She dreamed she was back in college, walking past that dark tree-lined corner of the campus everyone always said something bad would happen on one night, and through the bushes she saw a fight, Greg and a hooded assailant, locked in a silent clench she caught only flashes of while the moonlight veered drunkenly, a glint off a knife; when she reached the clearing Greg lay stiff in a pool of blood, eyes wide and dead, his murderer a rustle moving away through the trees, and she woke with a gasp. Unable to sleep again, she sat in the dark kitchen until it permeated her senses that there was something outside on the balcony, a hint of animal movement, perhaps just a cat, though she could hear nothing, and she returned to bed and huddled against his warm back.

That dark corner of the campus.

On the third day of being zombies Georg came looking for her. She had told Cyndi to announce she was sick and had told her what really happened. She was the only one in the company who would ever hear it, the best kind of friend that way, never leaking information, but Georg had grown suspicious. He stood in her apartment haranguing her in German because she was patently not sick when Greg walked through from the bedroom, uncaring, wearing only shorts on his way to the kitchen, and Georg (whose restraint, she knew, was usually commendable) stared at his scar. Greg noticed.

"Oh, get those German baby-blues back in your head," he said. The bitterness in his voice hurt her. "Yeah, it's ugly. Become a doctor and you'll see a lot worse."

She asked Georg for two more days and he nodded. At the door he turned to her. "I don't know what's wrong with him or what's going on between you," he told her, "but please don't let it affect you like this." He looked sickened, as though he wanted to bundle her away from there and never let her back. "You have a life, Dani, even if he doesn't."

She found Greg in the kitchen and sat across from him. "It's time to get past this," she said. "We've got to go over there some time." He shrugged. "You can't pretend forever that it didn't happen."

"I'm not. I'm – wishing it hadn't happened. That's different."

"No, it's not."

"I'd truly give an arm and a leg for it not to have happened, Dani." His eyes were wide and honest. "And that's from someone who doesn't have a leg to spare." He watched her for a moment, then went to put his clothes on.

His apartment seemed to breathe bad air, as though the dust raised by such emotions would never settle. They waded through debris to the middle, holding hands. The panic rose in her throat; in a rush she felt it all again – the sharp stench of bile, voices crying incomprehensible instructions. The bluish tinge his skin had had. The piano, with its white line of pill-less keys, frightened her. Perhaps it really was too soon. He stood staring down with such a sad expression at the acoustic guitar – or rather the pieces of it – scattered near the piano, that she took his arm and said, "It's just a thing, dammit." He looked up. "It can be replaced. You could never be." She tried not to raise her voice. He seemed as breakable as thin glass. "You're here and that's all that matters." He nodded. "I suppose Wilson can help us clean up. Maybe Foreman too."

"No." He shook his head emphatically. "The ducklings can't be allowed to see this." Then, as if it had just occurred to him: "I'm calling Foreman tomorrow to arrange for your PET scan."

He refused to accompany her to the test two days later. She knew she'd spouted some crazy things to him in the hospital room; her vision (that rent in the gauze of reality), and the fear of having almost lost him, had for a while shriveled her to a moaning heap of cryptic pleas, something about never leaving each other's sight again. ("It was the Xanax Wilson gave you," he'd assured her several times since. "A paradoxical effect can cause aggression, panic, even hallucinations." Completely ignoring the fact that her only hallucination had come before she'd swallowed anything.) His hard look as he wrote out her appointment with Foreman said she shouldn't push it.

The hospital overflowed with normalcy. As Foreman waited with her for the PET tracer to take effect, he asked questions. Would she describe herself as very religious? No, the opposite. Had she had the experience more than once? (The New Year's party would remain her secret, she decided). Finally she interrupted. "What does this have to do with religion? What did Greg tell you?"

"Temporal-lobe epilepsy is associated with over-religiosity. Joan of Arc, that kind of thing." His dark eyes were as penetrating as Greg's. "He told me you'd had some…experience, a vision, that made you believe you're meant to stay with him, that the two of you belong together on some mystic spiritual level." She nodded and bit her lip. "I asked him if he was sure he wanted to debunk that. He said he didn't want you staying with him for that kind of reason – he wanted to know you were staying with him because of him." It startled her that Greg would have revealed his inner self like that and her face must have shown it. "Yeah, he sort of realized he'd said too much. He clammed up after that."

She asked him if the test was expensive. "You could say that. Cuddy's only letting him do it because he's promised to go to psych counseling. Come on, the tracer should be decaying by now. Let's do the test."

The results were negative. She watched Greg's face later, as he spoke to Foreman on the phone. She tried to tease apart the jargon. She heard the German word _geschwind_. "What?" she asked, alarmed. "What's 'fast'? What's 'rapid'?"

"Geschwind was a German doctor," he told her. He hung up on Foreman without saying goodbye. "There's a Geschwind syndrome associated with epilepsy, with certain symptoms, none of which you exhibit."

She tried to quiet her breathing. "Then what do I have, Greg?"

"I don't know what you have."

"Why can't you accept it was something real? I saw something, I still get this panicky feeling when you're out of my sight, but there's a reason for it. It's probably going to go away after a while –"

"It's going to go away now. Wanna know why? Because I am." He stood, looking for his keys, and grimaced at the wall behind which his apartment lay. "That is, if I can find some clothes in ground zero over there. I'm leaving and I'll be back in exactly three days."

She begged him not to. "I'm not sick in the head, Greg. You don't need to do this."

"I know you're not and yes I do. What you have is called eremophobia, a fear of being alone, and we're getting rid of it with a little shock therapy."

He took the bike and left. Didn't even tell Cuddy, apparently, who had expected him to start his therapy sessions and be back at work that week, and who called frantically several times a day to ask whether he'd shown up again. Curt with her, as though she assumed Dani had set off this new crisis. She went to bed on the third night and was awoken by him at midnight, from where he sat on the edge of the bed. He took her hands, placed them on his cheeks and said, "See?" as though it were a discussion broken off minutes ago rather than days. "See, we're still here, the world is still here." And he took her hands from his face and slapped them down on the nightstand hard enough to hurt, to show her.

No, it was nonsense and he wasn't having any of it, but the grief of what they'd gone through remained.

They moved through the kitchen in their old patterns in the evenings, when she didn't have to dance (and her moves when she did go to work were so viscous, the spring gone out of them, that she knew the whole company noticed). It was almost easy again. The three days away had released some tension in him. She told him about Cuddy calling – "Her voice sounded so strained I thought she must have gotten that turkey baster you're always telling me about stuck up in there" – and he laughed. Her legs suddenly felt weak, and she sat down with a little "Oh."

"What is it?"

"It's just so - good to see you smile." More than good; she felt warm all over. "I didn't know if you could anymore."

He looked disconcerted. "Of course I can still smile. It wasn't botox injections I tried to kill myself with."

Her fingers played with his on the table. "We're going to be all right after all, aren't we?" He nodded.

But of course they weren't all right. He went to the therapist Cuddy ordered up, in Greg's words a very accommodating person who, according to him, happily accepted his refusal in the first session to get into anything personal and thereafter spent twice a week talking ice-hockey with him. She didn't know if she believed that.

It took some time to admit to herself that he had stopped touching her.

During the day she might take his hand or run a finger along his hip, only to find that his eyes glanced away. At night in bed she sought his body, turned to press herself to him, lips and chest and further down, all the places on them that had always responded in parallel, looking for that affirmation of life, wanting it so much she thought she might burst with it, but it was no longer forthcoming. Where she had always felt his urgency it was as though he were shrinking from her.

_Kiss him_. Lips on lips, his beard soft, his own good smell below the whiff of disinfectant from his day at the hospital. If she could do the things she used to do for him; when she moved down and took him into her mouth, her mouth felt like a stranger's; how long since the last time? His drives had always been enormous, and now here he was staying impossibly soft, shameful and confusing, the rest of his body tense, as though he didn't want to know it was happening. She had her eyes closed. It was an inept whore who couldn't get a man hard with her mouth; she wanted to cry, then he pulled her up to him, acknowledging that it was useless. "I need more time," he mumbled. His voice sounded the way she felt. She let it go for a week, and then another.

The weeks were soon two months. Wilson visited often. They were left alone once, when Greg was called back late to the hospital on a case, and they began talking about the suicide attempt. Her friend Cyndi, she informed Wilson, had called it psychological blackmail, and he shook his head. No, he was convinced Greg had wanted to die. He told her about a conversation they'd had several years back. A patient of Wilson's had put his deer rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toes instead of waiting for his inoperable brain cancer to kill him, and Greg had seemed very affected by it.

"He said it must be the ultimate power trip – to extinguish yourself along with all you knew of yourself, all the memories and dreams back to day one. Worse than murder, he said, because a person who kills another is never really aware of all that is being lost." Wilson looked troubled. "The idea seemed to fascinate him." She felt chilled.

Routines were reestablished. She met Greg for lunch often, and greeted the ducklings, and Cuddy, who seemed cold toward her. One October noon she turned the corner and saw an older couple sitting in Greg's office with him, some kind of patient trouble, she presumed, since he looked displeased. She started to turn away, but he waved her in.

"Dani, meet my mom and dad."

She was used to nerves - after all, she was a stage performer - yet she knew the shock made her appear flustered. They had surprised him too, apparently, just popping in on their way to Timbuktu. They were normal enough. His mother hugged her. His father had flashes of the same wit, so she could see where Greg got it, that and his height. No one acknowledged it might be odd she'd been his most intimate partner for over a year and had never met them. They wanted to do lunch. He made neck-slashing motions to her behind their backs and said an urgent case had come up. The alternative, of course, was dinner.

"You're dancing, aren't you?" Greg said with a warning look.

It was a tipping point. "No," she answered truthfully, after a moment's hesitation. "We can do dinner." She couldn't meet his eyes.

At home she put on a skirt and a high-neck sweater from the back of her closet. They were due at the restaurant in an hour. Greg stared. "What the hell is that? You look like my grandmother - _after_ she died." The argument was inevitable. She wanted to get to know his parents; he wanted to keep her away from them, if necessary, by entombing her in a brick wall.

"So you're going to impress them with your homemade-jam wholesomeness." He indicated the skirt. "Look, if my dad ends up liking you, I'll start to wonder about you."

"Okay, you can't stand to be with your dad." She had noticed in the office how he always maneuvered to keep someone else between him and his father, which had led to contortions as they were all leaving together, that he looked at the older man's forehead or shirtfront when he spoke to him. Never at his eyes. So the hate apparently was not just hate; it was abhorrence. "I'll meet them for dinner by myself."

His frightened look said he believed her. "Oh right. Just a cozy chat about me behind my back. My father will be his usual charming self and I'll have to forever listen to you saying, 'I don't know what's wrong with you, Greg – he's nice'." There it was again, his inability to let her make up her own mind about things. He sighed. "It's just a waste of time."

"Time you would spend doing what? Watching TV? Screwing me?" His pitiful look made her feel like kicking herself.

She went and changed into her jeans.

The restaurant was packed. And they really were boring. She knew Greg hadn't told them about the overdose and she steered clear of anything that might lead to it, which left her with little to say and, she realized, made her seem stuck-up. When she went to the restroom, his mom trailed along, and at the sinks she started talking about Stacy. "When she left him it was so bad." She didn't seem to realize it was crass talking about the old girlfriend to the new one. "I…was really scared for him for a while." She whispered the word _scared_ as though it were dirty.

"You don't have to be scared for him anymore," she told her.

"I don't think so either." _Thanks a lot._ "You just don't know how relieved we are that he's found someone."

It made them conspirators and at the table his mother chatted away to them about his childhood.

"Greg believed in Santa Claus for the longest time. He must have been nine before –"

"Eight and a half, Mom."

"Believing the world owed him a favor," his father chimed in. She felt Greg's hand below the table clench and unclench. "You know, he was a favorite with the teachers for a long time too. Always something special –"

"Well, he was smart and funny – " his mother began.

"Funny? He was the class clown. Which is fine in first and second grade. You can get by in life with that for a while." Several of his comments had been of the same tenor: his son the morning glory, who had amounted to nothing. As though no one had ever told him what his son did for a living. Or as if only the traits he disapproved of counted in the weighing. "He grew up and found out you can't get by on being the joker all the time." Greg's face was pale with suppressed rage.

"It is a shame," she agreed. She smiled at Greg. "Now he has to get by with just being brilliant at what he does."

He stared at her for so long, so grateful, while the waiter cleared their plates, that she had to look away.

At home she showered, the residue of his father's stupidity soaped away, then put on her robe and stood on the balcony. The air was brisk. Down the street jack-o'lanterns dotted the stoops of apartment buildings. Greg joined her and put his arms around her from behind. It surprised her. His lips moved through her hair, down to her neck. He undid the sash of her robe, keeping the top closed to the view of the street, and smoothed his hands up – and down – on her still-moist skin and there it was, the urgency. She wanted to cry out to the stars. She bent forward across the rail and he lifted the back of her robe. They held each other's mouths, laughing silently, when the door to the balcony over theirs opened and steps shuffled out just feet above their heads, but no hand of hers reaching back could silence him, he couldn't be quiet when he came if his life depended on it, she'd once told him, his thrusts nailing her against the rail, until he yelled out, a deep-throated shriek. The steps above them retreated quickly and then they were laughing out loud. The second time was on the reclining deck chair, slow and sweaty-sweet, while she straddled him. His cock inside her was fire; her chest felt full, as though he were impossibly long, prodding her heart. "I love you so much," he whispered. The air was warm and they lay still, forehead on forehead. "Let's go away," he said. She nodded.

--

They drove to Vermont for a weekend to see the leaves turn, or as he put it, "to stay in the B&B and screw for two days." The sun was with them. The tiny town they had chosen sported a touristy central square, through which they strolled the first day until his leg hurt, stopping to watch a busker play a dulcimer, an instrument he studied for two minutes and then sat down and played a ditty on. Climbing the stairs to their room in the evening (the B&B having screwed up her ground-floor reservation), he smiled and told her to go on ahead of him, then frowned at the water running into the lion's-paw tub when he got there. "The reason you ran on ahead was to get ready for me," he informed her.

"I'm not going to miss taking a bath in this thing. You can wait."

He hooked the head of his cane under her shirt and pulled her slowly to him. "I don't want to wait."

The bed was an old-fashioned monstrosity. Its iron headboard banged against the wall with every thrust. Pillows didn't help. She made him get on the floor, laughing at his astonished look. "This is a family-run place and they'll hear," she told him. "I don't want them staring at us at breakfast." "Oh god, my girlfriend's a prude." Afterward, from where they lay exhausted on the braided rug, he pulled a piccolo champagne from the mini-bar. "Makes a better celebration than ice-cream." He nudged her onto her back and poured a prickling drop into the hollow of her throat – "Cold," she gasped – and sipped it away, then a splash in her navel, then on her clit, too swollen by his thrusts from before to feel much as he kissed it away there. "Your turn," she told him. He was already laughing as he stretched out on his back: Adam's-apple, his outy navel - nothing held. She gave up, laughing with him. "Men don't have hollows." She drew a champagne line with her finger across his softening cock. "Need more time?" she teased. "Give me half an hour, woman." No hollows. An idea occurred to her. "Turn on your side," she told him.

And felt him go tense as she poured champagne in his scar.

Since their fight at New Year's she had not touched it, other than to brush against it in their lovemaking. She had never stroked it like she did now – possessive, attentive to the degree she might have been with his lips, his chest, his cock. There had always been the knowledge that she had to hold back from that one small place, a sense that had only grown worse after the scene on New Year's Eve. After all they had been through it seemed insane.

A little of the champagne held in the dented skin. He had told her the nerves were dead there on the surface. His eyes were closed. An animal playing dead, waiting for it to be over. "I know what you think," she murmured.

"No, you don't." His voice sounded tortured. "You're not telepathic and you have no idea what I think."

"It's just – as if it were a black hole. As if your body stops here –" her finger touched the top of the scar – "and starts back up down here. I want all of your body. All of you."

"That's not me, dammit. It's a patch of dead skin."

"Show me exactly. I want to know."

After a long hesitation, his hand came up to trace a path along the edges, outlining where the nerves started up again, and her lips followed it. His mouth opened in a groan of pleasure, then he turned on his back and pulled her up to him. "You have all of me," he whispered. "Everything I can give. That's the truth."

_No_, she thought. Not the truth. Not the way he had all of her, but a step closer. She thought of his face as he had knelt begging her to stay. There was a knot there inside him that went beyond the leg, a scar he wouldn't let her touch.

She nodded. A step closer.

And driving back the next day he slipped into one of the moods she so loved, playful without the sharp edge of the pills. She found a classic-rock station and propped her feet on the dash while he belted out the songs along with the radio (he had a strong voice), pushing the car up to ninety, passing the turnoffs to small towns in a blur. He was playing air piano with both hands all the way out the window to My Woman from Tokyo, making her laugh, driving with his knees (making her more than a little scared), when a state trooper pulled them over. "Wow," he whispered as they watched the cop approach the car, "I must have been going fast enough to blow him out of his donut shop."

The man was middle-aged, with a paunch, courteous in a cop-cliche way. He studied Greg's license and then his face. "Sir, your eyes look a little red. Have you been drinking?"

"Your eyes look a little glazed. Have you been eating donuts?"

She groaned inwardly. It was old and the guy had set himself up for it, but his cop face went very cold.

"Okay, you caught me," Greg told him. "Been imbibing fun." He grew conspiratorial. "Might have been some lust mixed in there too. I mean, get a load of her. She's on the prohibited-substance list herself -"

"Step out of your vehicle, sir."

The trooper's exhortation to walk a line to the patrol car and back got a "Not going to happen." Greg shrugged. "Not without that big stick on the back seat there." From what she could see of the cop's face he was already imagining what Greg would look like in handcuffs. "Come on, Occifer," Greg sighed. "Just let me give you a blow job and we can both be on our merry ways. In your case merry but vigilant, of course."

The 150-dollar ticket on top of the breathalyzer test didn't seem to faze him. They pulled away, slower. The rock station had faded out. "You have a problem with authority," she told him.

"I have a problem with people who've been given authority for no reason."

"Oh, the fact that someone's gone through rigorous training for a very hard job and does that job well doesn't earn him respect?"

He glanced at her. "Could it be you just described me? What kind of respect do I get?"

"The respect you get is that you haven't been fired yet." She flipped through stations. "One day that mouth of yours is going to get you in real trouble."

"Something it _luckily_ hasn't done yet. No, wait. It got me you."

It was prophetic.

Leaves turned to sails on the wind. An early snow fell. In November she answered a knock on Greg's door while he was away, and stood before a tall white-haired man with baby-fat cheeks, who looked as if he'd swallowed his pacifier when he saw her and checked the number on the door. The policemen behind him came into view. She felt breathless, felt the soles of her bare feet against the floor.

"I have a search warrant for the residence of Gregory House." Baby-fat was looking her up and down now. He actually hitched his pants, male posturing _as if you had a chance blubberdoll_. Her thoughts were scattering. Greg was in trouble. _Get control_, she couldn't remember who had told her that once, someone who'd been in it with the cops a lot.

She made him show her his badge, knowing her voice sounded shaky. M. Tritter, Detective. She insisted on reading every word of the warrant before watching them spread through the apartment, crashing open drawers and upturning cushions. She picked up the phone to call Greg and then put it down. Baby-fat's eyes, she saw, slid to her when she wasn't looking. Detective M. Tritter was trying to figure something out. Pills were coming out of the woodwork, as she knew they would. In the kitchen one of the searchers retrieved the never-used flashlight from under the sink and screwed open the compartment. Where batteries should have been, a bag of pills spilled out. She had never been ashamed for Greg, but now she wanted to melt into the floor. Detective Baby was grinning, but he grew serious and came to stand in front of her, so close they were almost touching. He smelled of indigestion and too much coffee. She thought of what the warrant had said. "Greg House is not a drug trafficker," she told him.

"He must get his money from somewhere if he can buy something like you." Her hand twitched, one of those genetic urges Greg had once talked about, Tourette or Lesch-Nyhan, she would slap the guy in a minute. "You don't look like you come cheap."

She looked up at him. "_You_ couldn't buy me for all the money in the world."

When they were gone, she tried to straighten things and then gave up. Greg's shock when he walked in lasted two seconds. He knew.

Tritter was an ass, he explained. He refused to take it seriously. An apartment search couldn't scare him any more than a night in jail had and oops – he'd told her he'd spent that night the week before at the hospital on an urgent case, but there you go. He kept shrugging, his own little Tourette syndrome.

"It's a drug-peddling charge, Greg!"

"It's a small-fry cop on a revenge roll."

Tritter hadn't acted small-fry, she wanted to say. More like a crocodile, one that could bide its time and drink too much coffee, nurturing that evil smile at the corners of its mouth, before snapping its jaws shut.

Or closing them slowly, which was worse. The shakes started the next night. Wilson wasn't picking up his phone, prevented from writing prescriptions, Greg growled, by the pressure being put on him. _Freed from writing them_, she thought. He took the bike to the office at midnight, telling her openly that he was going to plunder his stashes there, not even pretending to her anymore, and then called her at two to pick him up, smart enough to know he was too high to operate a motorcycle. His eyes were glassy. He startled the nurses by laughing, hyena-like, at nothing. "Those were my last ones," he whispered as they went out the door, and the desperation in his voice chilled her.

He kept going to work, Cuddy apparently parceling out sweets to him based on how he behaved. She went to the hospital to join him for lunch, turned the corner and saw Tritter at the end of the hall. The bastard stared for a moment, then nodded, as though they shared some secret, before disappearing through a door. Wilson stood in Greg's office, arguing about Cameron of all things; though she tried to follow the gist of it, she felt left behind again, as she had ever since Tritter had stood at the apartment door, a feeling as though she were zapping through TV channels, always coming in on the middle of programs that were all just fights anyway, all the same vacuous broadcaster. The Conflict Channel.

"It's a fishing expedition!" Greg was yelling. "The jackleg is fumbling around in the dark hoping to find something and everyone is supporting him."

"Exactly what you do in your diagnoses," Wilson pointed out. "Admit it, the guy's just doing his job."

"The guy's job is to get meth-heads off the street. Keep the world safe from nuts and wackos."

"Hence – his hammering of you. Need I say more?"

"The guy's an ass. Wouldn't know a real crime if it gave him a rectal exam." He turned to her. "Cuddy's given him a _data-room_. Who needs a data-room to investigate one person?"

"This is your fault," Wilson insisted. "You were rude once too often. One insult too many."

"You should have thrown a spear at him instead," Dani said. It stopped them both.

Wilson sighed. "You're going to have to apologize," he summed up. Greg looked like he might remove him bodily from the room, but Wilson was already leaving. At the door he turned. "If you kick the world, all you'll ever do is break your own foot. Over and over."

The truth was – no truth. Or the simple truth, the one he'd told her their very first night, as they lay warm and drugged with sex – that he was an addict. She decided to call Wilson for the whole story (Greg had refused to tell her every time she asked what kind of proof the detective thought he had for drug-peddling, only looking at her and saying 'I love you' in a desperate, tossed-out way that turned her cold.) The story made her sick with hate for Tritter. Forged prescriptions were a crime, oh yes and wanting release from pain, wanting to feel good, but what punishment was fitting? Not the man she loved reduced to this, a shaking heap of limbs dry-retching over the sink. She came in unexpectedly on Monday night and found him standing over the ironing board in his shirtsleeves with the iron plugged in, an appliance she had seen him use exactly once, and for a second her mind cried, _Yes_, he was finally managing to pull it together, before she realized there were no clothes to be ironed anywhere near, that he had been ironing his arm.

"Greg."

The two small triangles on his forearm where he had pressed the very tip of the iron were red-fresh and glistening. He wouldn't look at her. She tried to hold him.

"All those people who cut themselves are stupid," he told the wall. "Burns can always be explained away as an accident. Plus, they hurt a lot longer." He was smiling now, insanely. He lifted the iron again.

"No!" She jerked it from him, easy because he was suddenly weak. "You've got to do something, Greg! You've got to apologize."

"I did." It stunned her. "I went to the precinct today and talked to him. Like a real person would. Man to Robocop. It didn't make a bit of difference." His eyes behind their red rims were frightened. "I'm going to go to prison. They'll take all my pills away, unless Cuddy can arrange those conjugal visits to sneak me some, and men very much larger than I am will take offense at my mouthing off, or just at the set of my eyes, and I'll wake up with a shiv between my ribs. Or I won't wake up because I'll be in a coma from the worst beating I ever had. I've had my lights punched out before. I hate it." His chuckle sounded like an animal in a trap. "And there's not one thing left I can do about it. Tritter had more staying power after all."

Pit-bull, she thought. Obsessive. Both of them so alike, but only one about to lose the game because of his physical addiction. If Tritter had any such weak spot they might have exploited they would likely never know.

"I'm scared," Greg said. She was seeing something new, she understood. All his strength gone. Even when he had tried to walk on his leg that time, stripped to nothing but bitter jealousy, it had been the strength of rage that pushed him. Not giving in. Even getting down on his knees, acknowledging that he had to do that very last thing to try and keep her. That had been strength too. Now he stood fumbling with the edge of the ironing board. "I know something," she whispered and led him to the bed, took his clothes off, feeling stupid because she didn't know enough about the big bad world to solve this problem, didn't know from addiction and cops' dirty tricks, only able to offer this one thing. She did everything to him they had ever done before and some things they hadn't. He went with her, forgetting where he was, forgetting everything, mouth and hands everywhere on her, wild with happiness for a while. She melted through his skin and forced the pain out, displaced it with herself, and he was beautiful inside, gentle and wonderful. They fit inside each other flawlessly. She turned to look out through his eyes, felt the bed sway as though they were out at sea, alone together in calm weather.

In the morning he went to work. She went to her rehearsal in the afternoon, left at five under the shadow of Georg's frown, and found the address she had looked up. The precinct hallways were busy. A cop showed her, with an odd smile, to a corner office. Tritter was alone.

His desk boasted neat stacks of reports and pens lined up. Obsessive. He hid his surprise with a smile. "Ms. Sieger." Of course he would have found out all he could about her. She sat. She didn't know how to start; she'd forced herself not to rehearse anything, just be natural, and then it came, the insight she'd had, why the punishment, aside from the fact that Greg wasn't peddling drugs, could never fit the crime. She tried to be objective, while he sat very still listening. If she could only make him see the real man, the good one, he would understand. How prison – _prison_ – for such a pathetic little failing as addiction was monstrous. For someone already cursed with hellish pain to be dropped into that pit.

Something in the word _pit_ wiped the smile from Tritter's face.

Someone for whom the good he did outweighed any bad. Greg occasionally got letters, she told him, that he didn't open, addressed in handwriting; they lay around so long she had finally opened one in secret and it had been a profuse thank-you note, from a couple whose child he'd saved, a confused meandering text that made her realize they were trying to express something impossible to say, that he had saved their lives as well.

"Maybe Greg will kill someone someday by making a mistake," she told him, "but every doctor in a branch like his runs that risk. Maybe it will even be because his brain's addled that day from the Vicodin. But you weigh that against all the ones he will have saved –" She knew the tears stood out in her eyes. She had steeled herself not to cry, sensing it would have the wrong effect on this anal-retentive adding machine. "Weigh it against the ones out here who will die while he's in a cell, just because you don't like him."

"What is it?" Tritter asked. As though she had just stepped through the door, as though she hadn't even begun yet - hadn't he even listened? His eyes roamed her face, her neckline. "What is it that could make a woman like you love him that much?" He chewed his gum, waiting.

She wanted to throw his paperweight at his face, stop his piggy eyes from moving on her. "Everything I just said." He nodded, unbelieving. It was time. "I would do anything in the world if it would persuade you to drop the charges, Detective Tritter."

And it had his full attention, the dirty, squirmy attention of a stray dog that's been thrown a bone. Shocked him perhaps. Eyes curving into a new shape. They sat in silence, the hum of the detail room penetrating to them.

"Mike –" A cop stuck his head in the door, stopped when he saw her, and glanced between them.

"Be right there," Tritter countered and the head withdrew. Another lengthy silence, then he was standing. "We should talk about this over dinner, Ms. Sieger."

He named an upscale restaurant across town, asked her if she could be there at seven, and she slung her knapsack over her shoulder without answering.

--

When she arrived, he already had a table. He had changed his clothes. She tried to listen, as the waiter lit their candles and brought wine. "Say Mike," he told her, after she'd said Detective Tritter for the third time. He was divorced, a grown son somewhere, he did his work well, had received commendations often, and liked the respect his job got him.

"Is that why you react the way you do to Greg? Because he doesn't give you respect automatically?"

"Let's not make it a therapy session, Danielle."

"We're here to talk about the charges."

_You know we're not_. She saw the words move in his slack mouth, in the tiny sickening smile, but they didn't come out.

He had done street busts for years, he explained, and had grown tired of the uselessness of it, of watching crackheads leave almost as soon as the arrest paperwork was finished. He was convinced it was the movers he had to target. "Hasn't he ever offered you anything? It's in the nature of a junkie to want to convert others."

No, she told him, but she had taken a Vicodin on her own once, snuck it from a bottle when Greg was gone, because she had to know what it was he felt. Her zero tolerance for anything stronger than aspirin had probably heightened the effect, scaring her: brain wrapped in cotton, her fingers far away. She'd called Wilson, who told her not to worry and that it would wear off fast.

Tritter watched her. As the meal progressed, his eyes had seemed to change, softening to smoke as though the candlelight seeped in, his face slightly flushed. The wine, she told herself (he'd had three full glasses), but she knew it wasn't that. She knew men's looks. The heat of real interest, hooking on and going past the pretty face. The hope of finding the same interest coming back at them. He leaned forward, his hands playing with a napkin. An idiot as well as a bastard. She realized she ought to get up and walk out. It was too dangerous a game.

"Proves you don't tell each other everything," he pointed out. "Not as intimate as you let on. You don't think he could keep things from you?"

"I'm sure he does."

"And your examination by Dr. Foreman? Does he know about that?"

The hospital files, of course. Anything with her or Greg's name on it would be fodder for him. "Greg ordered the test," she told him. "I – fainted and he wanted me checked."

"The file used the word 'seizure'. A word I encounter in my line of work maybe as much as Dr. House does."

"It wasn't drug-related, if that's what you're suggesting." Across the restaurant, a man in a turquoise baseball cap had turned to watch them from where he perched on a barstool. He was too far away for her to see his expression. It was the second time she'd caught his stare, directed at Tritter more than at her. Whenever it seemed she was looking, he twisted away. Tritter hadn't noticed him.

"And your past?" Tritter played with the candle flame, then looked up at her. "How much of it have you told your doctor-lover?"

She had no past, she informed him, fighting the sudden clench in her throat.

"The wonderful thing about being a law enforcement officer is the access to information, Danielle. Put in a name and any case it may have ever been connected with pops right up. Seems like the kind of thing that would have come up, if the two of you are that close."

"Please." A dangerous game, when one side held all the cards against you. "Please." She was pleading. "Greg thinks I got an abortion because I was careless with a boyfriend. He doesn't know the truth." Tritter's mouth hung barely open; he was eating it up. "Please don't tell him. Mike."

Then he was relaxing back in his seat and she knew it was over, the first moves in the game at least. She pushed her plate away. "Would you get me a taxi? I need to be getting home." She tried to emphasize _home_. His look darkened for a second, then he stood to retrieve her coat.

Behind him she saw the man in the turquoise cap stand at the same time, fling a bill on the bar and vanish out the door.

--

"Stop here."

"What?" She was driving Greg to Cherry Hill; he'd said he knew of a clinic that might prescribe him Vicodin without questions. She felt like the quintessential enabler. It was better than letting him drive himself, with his shakes and nausea.

She'd noticed him checking the side mirror. "We're being followed," he explained. "Pull over here, just before the exit." She did as he said, though it was the most dangerous place she could imagine. "Pop the hood."

In the afternoon sun, the restaurant from the evening before seemed like a bad and stupid dream. She hadn't told Greg about it. Now the dread returned. Cops following them, reporting back to Tritter, who could easily check any clinic for what might get prescribed. A trap they would have fallen into if Greg hadn't been observant.

"They'll have to pass us now," he said. "They'll have to decide whether to take the exit just ahead or stay on the highway, and when they're past, we'll do the opposite. With the hood popped, they won't even be sure we made them – we could really have had engine trouble. There –" he directed her gaze to the left. "Don't turn your head. The red Kia with the crushed bumper."

She glanced and a chill coursed through her. Only one person sat in the car. The man in the turquoise baseball cap. He kept his eyes ahead as he drove past. He stayed on the highway.

Greg got out and closed the hood. "Take the exit. We'll find another way to Cherry Hill."

"Please, Greg. Let's just go home - please. We can beg Cuddy to give you some more, just to get through the day." He was studying her face, puzzled. "_I can't_." With a sigh he nodded.

In the evening she met Tritter in a bar on Palmer Square. It was their second set of moves. He seemed beyond games, chatting happily. She wondered if he was really stupid enough to be falling in love with her, to think he was doing anything else but buying her company with the held-out promise of dropping the charges against Greg. She watched for the turquoise cap and saw nothing. "You and Greg are alike," she told Tritter. "Maybe that's it – like repelling like. You both see terrible things, people at their weakest. You both get down in the grit of it, you have to be strong and it makes you stubborn. It's something I couldn't do."

"I used to work homicide. In my experience, it was always the women who could take things. Certainly the physical side, the blood and bugs and shit, when the men were turning away to puke. Women are always stronger than anyone expects." He grimaced at having said it.

She took the bus home, telling him outright that she didn't want him driving her. Her skin prickled, the thought of lying to Greg when she got home or the breeze from the open bus window. Sensing someone watching her, she turned to study the heads in the rows of seats behind her. She saw nothing.

After the stop she had to walk two blocks. The sensation returned, and there he was, a shadow in her peripheral vision. On the other side of the deserted street, about twenty feet behind. He was matching her pace. The streetlights turned his cap greenish. She sped up and he was suddenly ahead of her, crossing diagonally to cut her off. She stood frozen, until he stopped a few feet away.

"Why are you following me?" she said in a voice that carried, praying for a light in a building to go on. "What do you want from me?"

"I wanna know what you are to Detective Tritter." The man was younger than he had seemed from afar, maybe twenty-five, but with the air of someone older. Hardened. A long scar ran from his eyebrow to his straw-blond hairline. Now that she saw him up close, she felt she'd seen him before the restaurant. Maybe at the precinct.

"You're undercover, aren't you?" she said. "Internal affairs, something like that. Tritter's done something wrong, hasn't he?"

"And what if he has?" It came a beat too late. She felt confused, as though they were talking about two different things.

"I'm Greg House's girlfriend." No reaction. "The doctor he's investigating on drug-peddling." If this man could get Tritter in trouble, she had to play it for all it was worth. "Tritter's opening himself up to sexual favors." _Lie_. "He's promised to drop the charges if I'll sleep with him."

"Does he love you?" The question was so odd she stepped back. Her eyes sought the street for a passerby. Was he even a cop? If he was undercover, the clothes were the perfect street cred – ragged jeans, oily t-shirt. The slight stink that said missed showers.

"I don't even know what that's supposed to mean," she answered. "We'd never spoken more than two words to each other before yesterday. How the hell should I know what he feels?"

"The way he looks at you." He seemed to have answered his own question. Down the street a laughing couple climbed out of a taxi and headed toward them. Like a spooked animal he turned to go.

"Wait," she called. "Tell me what Tritter's being investigated for. What has he done?"

He looked back over his shoulder and the cap shadowed his eyes. "Something bad."

--

You try very hard, you make a bust and discover there's enough evidence to seek charges. Doing your job, just that sweet when it dovetails so smoothly with your hate. You create a data room, lovingly, where you keep neat stacks of everything you need to exert pressure: on the black guy, on the Australian, who is soft as a used and snotty tissue. Your resolve means your motives are pure. You keep your ears open and you overhear things. For instance, outside the second-floor restroom at the hospital.

He stepped closer to the door to listen.

The Australian had it in him: "So, tell me, what was Dani doing with Tritter in the A&B last night?"

A gruff silence, then the voice, so hated: "What are you talking about?"

"I was there with a date. I saw them across the room."

"Skipping your opthamologist appointments again, Dr. Chase? Dani went out with her dance troupe last night."

"Then her dance troupe is…the pudgy middle-aged guy who arrested you?" Yes, the Australian had it in him.

The reply was inaudible, the low rumble before an explosion; the cane scraped the floor.

"Hey, I _have_ met Tritter, you know. I sat across from him in his little room and he asked me about my drug bust back in Australia. I wouldn't mistake someone else for him. He was there and he was with Dani." A scrape, feet walking away.

He took his time washing his hands.

When he entered his data room his opponent was already there, crossing to him so fast it occurred to him for the first time that the man was as tall as he was, though rangier, that the cane could be a problem, and his defensive training flashed through his mind, ten ways to disarm a drug fiend. House stopped close to him.

"Here to apologize again, Dr. House?"

"Why don't you take a flying fuck at an MRI tube. You've been harassing my girlfriend."

"Oh, she came to me." He moved away casually, got the table between them. _You keep your voice even_. The dead calm that infuriates them. "A very beautiful woman. We had a pleasant talk in my office that ended in dinner."

"Keep away from her." House's voice was beyond dead calm.

"You know what she calls your addiction, Dr. House? A 'pathetic failing'. She's convinced you're going to make a mistake and kill someone someday. Yet she's still willing to make a huge sacrifice to keep you out of prison. How did she put it? 'I'd do _anything_ to persuade you to drop the charges, Detective Tritter.'"

House's face went blank. The sheer numbness of understanding. He could see his chest move up and down.

"Such loyalty on Danielle's part. Willing to make that sacrifice. Or why else has she met me twice now? Come to think of it, we hardly talked about you at all both times. Maybe it wouldn't be such a sacrifice for her after all. I'm not so fucked in the head that I'm puking on her shoes. That must be attractive after something like you, Dr. House." _Up the ante_. "I've got two good legs."

It was like being hit by lightning, the pure and clean slice through his brain of revenge well-rendered. House looked like he'd been stomach-punched. It shouldn't feel that good. He was just doing his job, any means fair if it meant the suspect would break. It wasn't _about_ the revenge and never had been.

But his suspect wasn't breaking, not yet anyway. The silence was the silence of profound deafness, of the void. Then House said, "It won't work." He almost smiled. "You really think you're gonna get your banana peeled, don't you? Dani_elle_ wouldn't wipe her shoes on you. I believe the term of art is 'stringing you along.'" He turned and left.

No, it shouldn't feel good, but there it was. Schadenfreude, the Germans called it, joy at someone else's pain. Perhaps he could work the word into a conversation and impress her. House didn't know everything (_stringing you along_). She had looked straight at him. She had told him things about herself she didn't have to. "She called prison a pit," he whispered to the door. Well then it was a cleansing pit. And it was her boyfriend who needed cleansing, like they all did – the addicts, the fuckheads. The weak.

The ones with the broken eyes. Eyes so hurt and vulnerable. Hating you for doing your job.

You rub your own eyes, quelling the pressure behind them, and you get back to work.

--

She waited outside the studio for Greg to pick her up so he wouldn't have to come inside. So they wouldn't see the shadows under his eyes. He was capable of driving, he'd assured her on the phone, Cuddy having been at the right time of the month to take pity on him and prescribe him a few more pills. He was late. The young bum who seemed to live on the corner below the studio and whom Cyndi had nicknamed Boy Harmless asked her for money, standing close. She was smiling and shaking her head at him when Greg honked the horn.

As she got in the car, Greg kept his eyes on Harmless. "You'd come on to anything in pants, wouldn't you?" he muttered.

The shock settled into her bones. She stared out the windshield on the way home, hardly daring to move.

In the kitchen he went straight for a beer. "Greg." His movements were jerky; the beer cap flew to the floor. Finally he turned.

"Did you tell Tritter you'd sleep with him?"

So he knew. Tritter must have goaded him with it. She was shaking her head.

"But you let him think it. Held it out. Said something specific."

He was so tense with rage she expected smoke to rise off him any second. She was lost again.

"It's for you," she told him. Surely he knew that. "If he can be implicated in something like this, it will help you. There's a man –"

"_Stay out of my affairs!"_ The shout filled the kitchen. "You don't know what the fuck you're doing. You think Tritter's stupid?" _Yes_. "He's smart as a snake, Dani. You think your puny pollyanna tricks will work on someone who's been in the snow business that long – just wiggle that prize-winning butt at him and –"

"_No_. Greg, I think he's being investigated by his department –"

"You _think_? You didn't think. Or rather, you thought with your cunt as usual."

Like a slap. It was the stress, she would tell herself that until she believed it, while her arms hugged herself as if to ward off his shouts. He was pushed to his limits by the withdrawal, the fear of prison. An image flashed, his palms stroking her stomach, gentle-sweet, his lips there, had it only been the night before? Mood swings, Wilson always called it, an innocuous title for something so colossal.

He was close now, towering over her. "All you've done is probably ensure that he _won't_ drop the charges, Dani. Did anyone see you go in his office?" _Yes_. "If he drops the case now, they'll say it was just because of you. You've practically forced him to keep pursuing it so he won't look like he's being influenced." Her small gasp got his attention. He was right. She'd never thought of that, her simple intrigue, once started, creating trapdoors behind trapdoors. Turquoise-Cap. "He'll probably even file a report now on how I sent my girlfriend to spread her legs for me, just one more thing he'll have in his hand against me."

_Get control_. She'd tried something, for his sake, that was all. He had no right to shout. She would match his rage. "You're the one who did something stupid," she told him. "You insulted the wrong person, you wouldn't apologize for so long –"

It was the wrong ploy. It made him almost gleeful, she could see, to bring all his guns to bear. "_I'm stupid_? Who's the one here with the college degree in _dance_?" She wanted to put her hands over her ears. _Don't go there, please_. "Is it a 'pathetic failing' when your hardest course load is Waltzing 101 and Advanced Ballet-Shoe Tying? Who's the stupid one? Huh?"

"Please stop." She didn't know if she'd spoken out loud. He knew what having respect from him meant to her, had to know it. So easy for him to throw it away, that respect. As though his voice pushed her, she was suddenly sitting in the chair behind her. His words broke over her in waves.

"I always knew you were dumb, Dani, but this takes the moron cake. You couldn't think in any language but ditsy if my life depended on it, could you? Which it does. Oh yeah, I'm going to prison now thanks to your meddling. You can come visit me. Maybe you can pull a Midnight Express and rub your tits on the window."

"I didn't offer – they can't prove –" Her breath wouldn't form sentences. _Don't cry_. Too late. "I didn't say anything specific to him. His word against mine. And I wouldn't have slept with him –"

"Yes, you would have." He looked like he would throw up. She saw that he didn't know whether to believe it or not either.

_For you, maybe. I don't know anymore_. For him, for his body there in front of her, hardened with anger now, and yet vulnerable in her imagination, wracked with pain in a prison cell. The strange expression on Tritter's face when she had called prison a pit.

He was shouting again. "Oh don't start with the tears!" Tears – no, she was sobbing now, gasping, but he didn't care. "Everyone's going to love this one around the water-cooler. Chase won't keep his mouth shut. Half the place thinks I buy you anyway –" (that was supposed to be a joke, she wanted say, couldn't say for the jerking cries coming from her) – "now they'll figure someone just came along who could pay you a little more! Or maybe they'll believe the sexual-favor line." His voice went babyish - _"She was going to save me_!" - then grew in immensity, until it shook the air in the kitchen - "Either way I'll go to prison comforted by the thought that everyone in the world knows the truth, that my girlfriend's not just stupid – _she's a slut_!"

For a moment he was silent and in the silence her sobs finally became words, forced out, breathless. "It's – it's not Tritter." From far away she sensed his confusion, but she was beyond communication, just crying out to herself, the knowledge: "It's not me. It's not – not even you." Sobs beating their way to the truth. "It's the _drug_. _It's the - damn – pills._ It's why you can be so wonderful one day and so – so _awful_ the next!" He seemed to freeze at the word _awful_. His hand came up as though to touch her hair. "It's going to kill every - everything we have and there's nothing I can do about it." The knowledge filled her lungs and her heart; she couldn't breathe. "It's going to happen. It will be the end one day." _This won't go on forever_.

There were no more words, she realized, the despair of that knowledge inexpressible. That what she felt went beyond the love of a woman for a man, that when she saw the burns on his arm she knew what a lioness felt, that if a Mack truck were bearing down on him she would step in front of him without a thought. Despair because it would not be enough, that even that fierce, fierce loyalty meant nothing in the equation - simply nothing at all to the pills that shrugged their shoulders and laughed.

Her throat felt crushed by sobs. She kept trying to breathe, but there was no more room, breaths turned to steel gasps. "You're hyperventilating," someone said. She felt fingers in her hair, hesitant, then he crouched in front of her "Breathe out, dammit." There was a black picture hanging on the wall behind him, growing larger and blacker.

She came to, hot. He held her in his arms on the floor, staring down, his face not alarmed, just numb with spent emotion. "You passed out for a second," he told her.

Her hands tingled. Acid flooded her mouth. "I'm going to be sick," she muttered and stood.

"Don't sta –"

She was already at the sink. Nothing came.

"This is because you haven't eaten anything." He stood beside her, opened the fridge, not looking at her.

"I had something."

"What was lunch?" She didn't answer. Louder: "What was lunch?"

"An apple."

"Thought so."

She might have been a patient, symptoms boring, but his voice, so clipped, held layers of emotion. His hands shook and a package of cold-cuts fell on the floor. He slapped a sandwich together, sloppy with things she never ate, and pushed it at her.

Over for now, she realized. It was his way of asking forgiveness. Love in a horrible sandwich.

Although her own hands shook she pulled off a thumbnail-sized chunk of bread and shoved it around in her mouth without getting it down.

Separate rooms for the evening (what else did you say after that?), and when she went through the bedroom later, the open window letting in the cold, she found him stretched out on the bed, lost in zombie thought. Their fights were like sex, she realized. They lost themselves in the fighting, slumped exhausted afterward. She lay beside him, both of them still, her head on his chest, and he put his arm around her. She couldn't remember all she'd said; it was already fading. She'd called him awful, she felt. She could hear his heart. It was right there, she thought, that hard knot, pain or sorrow, that made him the way he was. There below where her head rested. If she could just reach in and untwist it, slide her hand into his heart, feeling along blind until she found it (careful not to change anything else), she would loosen that knot. Not for herself or because she wanted him different, but for him – because it was killing him. If she could only find it she would cut it out, a quick little surgery, no blood.

And then he did it for her.

"I want to tell you that memory now," he said. It took a moment for her to remember. They hadn't been together long; she'd wanted to get to know him, just pillow talk, and she'd said, _Tell me one good memory and one bad memory from your childhood_. He'd simply refused, telling her to come up with a different question. She'd locked the moment away ever since, as meaning nothing or everything.

"When I was five, maybe six," he began, "my dad brought me home a pet from the pet shop." She wondered if this was the good memory, but something in his voice told her it wasn't. "It was a tarantula. It had its own little terrarium and fact booklet and everything. The point of the exercise was that I'd been frightened by a spider in the house the day before. Couldn't go near it, a real panic attack, tears and all, and he'd had to kill it for me. This pet tarantula was going to teach me to get over my fears." Beyond the window evening voices floated up. She felt strangely light. She couldn't see his face. "So he made me take all my clothes off and he tied me to the bed and let the tarantula crawl all over me."

The voices on the street passed by, children calling to one another.

"It probably lasted an hour. I wasn't supposed to scream, but I did, until it got to my face and I had to keep my lips and my eyes shut. It got in my hair and in my crotch. Whenever it crawled off, he'd use these tongs that had come with it to put it back on me." Their bodies were like stones pressed against one another; she could see her hand on his chest but couldn't move it. Only their hearts moved, then his little shrug. "I was never scared of spiders again."

There was the boiling-water incident, he told her. He'd cried a lot up to a certain age, and when he was three and couldn't stop bawling about something, his dad had boiled water in the kettle on the stove, held him bent backward over his knee and told him he was going to pour the water in his eyes to burn the tear ducts away. It was his earliest memory of such incidents, and he'd come to realize later that it was probably because of the tangible sight of that single drop that had never fallen, brimming at the edge of the spout above his face, while he begged and swore to be good. He still saw it sometimes, hypnagogic, when he was about to go to sleep.

His voice droned on, ghost talk, the words of the dead some people claimed to hear in white noise, babbling things her mind could not take in; ice-baths when the four-year old said the bathwater wasn't warm enough, being locked in a trunk after he tried to run away - building up a picture of abuse, over years, that had been carefully calibrated not to leave physical marks, while mom stood by helpless, and which transformed - once he got older and more at risk of telling an outsider – into pure mind games, psychological beatings: for his ninth birthday, in the presence of other kids, he opened his dad's gift to him to find it was diapers and a rattle (because he'd been such a baby the past year). (The reason he hated getting gifts now, the ghost voice said, with a ghost chuckle). When he was seven, he was driven to the orphanage outside of town, a flat grey building behind a gate, that had always terrified him with its implication of sorrow, and was told to get out and go in, his dad assuring him he'd called already and they were willing to take him (the misdemeanor that had precipitated this incident long forgotten). He'd stood outside the gate in the cold rain for two hours while his dad presumably drove around, simply standing there freezing, holding his little bit of hope that it was just another trick, praying for the Buick to come back around the corner and not wanting it to, until it finally did, his father's face through the windshield hard, to pick him up.

It had grown dark, she realized, as Greg spoke; objects in the room had gone away, only his disembodied voice still there, so low and simple, though the words were like little earthquakes: she felt as though she rode on his chest while the earth shattered beneath them, that she had to hold on or they would both fall. His chest moved in an odd rhythm, sharp peaks of breath quickly gasped out, and she realized he was crying.

"How could he do those things?" he whispered, moaned. "One of the two people in the world who're supposed to love you when no one else does, no – no matter what. Someone explain that to me." She crawled all the way on top of him, her arms around him. She wanted to cover him. "_How?_" Why doesn't he _love_ me?"

Doesn't. She thought of the gray-haired man in the restaurant, so harmlessly frail, and yet forty years back a young broad-shouldered Marine with an intelligent, sensitive son he couldn't understand and stupid _stupid_ theories about making a man out of him. How he would have towered over a kid of three, or four or nine. The little wisp of a soul being twisted day after day. She took Greg's wet face in her hands. "Why?" he asked her. "Why?"

Words came to her, roaring inside her, the lioness. She had to hold on to him. "It wasn't _you_," she told him. She was crying too. "It wasn't your fault, Greg. He would have done that to his son no matter how perfect the kid was – you could have done everything exactly the way he wanted and he would have found something else wrong – Greg, Greg, listen to me!" He was shaking his head, shielding his face from her with his arm. She fought him until he unclenched. _Fight this, cut the knot_. She tried to smooth his face with her hands. "There were no standards you didn't live up to – those weren't standards, just insane expectations! You didn't fail some test of love. You couldn't have been a better kid or more lovable. Please listen, Greg, _you didn't fail!_" He wouldn't look at her, eyes toward the ceiling as tears ran down his face, holding his breath as though she plunged a needle in him again and again, seeking the tumor. "He happened to be your father and he happened to be incapable of love. You weren't a bad son. It was random, random that you were born to someone like him!" _Make him see_. "As random as what happened to your leg." He went very still. "You might as well be mad at God, if you want to believe in him, for sending you the infarction. You've always thought that was punishment for something too, haven't you? Greg, you weren't being punished for being a certain way. Not by your dad and not by God." Her own voice had become a child's, pleading. "Don't you see? It doesn't mean you're unlovable." _My darling_.

His eyes found hers and for a long time he stared at her, while the tension seeped away from him and his stabbing breaths stilled. He put his hands in her hair. "_I_ love you," she told him. "Let me. I have enough." He held her close, her head on his chest again.

"You've got to forget him," she whispered.

"I've tried to for a long time," he whispered back. "I don't know if I can."

When she awoke in the morning he had left for work. She felt fragile as she moved about the apartment, as though she'd woken up to a different world, one in which things made sense.

There were children who went through much worse things, she knew, and came out untouched, while others – the sensitive souls, probably the intelligent ones – curled up and died on the inside in the brunt of love withheld, the merest harsh word. She understood him so well now. Where other adults had a core of strength to draw on, values about themselves they had been given, a trust that they were loved and that the world was workable, he had no such thing - hollow in the middle where it counted, but putting all his strength in keeping himself upright. A tower of flesh and bone and psyche held up by sheer will, and which probably took more strength than others could muster who had that inner cushion to fall on. At times the tower would crumble in one place – the infarction, being deserted by Stacy - and would have to be shored up, but that was all it was – shored up, never fixed, until it started to crumble again.

No wonder he needed love like food. No wonder he was addicted.

She tried to get him on his phone and left messages. When he hadn't called by noon, she phoned Wilson to ask if Greg was busy on a case.

"You really did it, didn't you?" Wilson said.

Her heart missed a beat. "What?"

"I didn't think there was one thing in the world that would get him to check into rehab like this. What did you say to him?"

She had to sit down.

Greg had checked himself in that morning, Wilson told her, surprised once he realized she knew nothing about it. She listened to herself ask inane questions, how long it would be and if she should take him his toothbrush, while her hands smoothed a corner of the kitchen towel in front of her. She didn't know how to think about it, what the degree of honesty behind it might be. Too true to be good, as he might have said. She only knew she was happy that he had had the strength for this last perfect chess move against Tritter. She thought about the detective and how she would present it to him, how his pig-eyes would widen. Yes, things made sense.

There was a way out.

--

And then he'd pushed the third-floor button and told them where he was going and it was that simple. Don't think, banish all thought, which would make it easier, but their faces wouldn't let him. Six eyes on him, blank stares, looking more than ever like ruffled ducklings. Mouths open. Gratifying and a little disquieting because, in spite of how often he'd been on the receiving end of those stares, it told him how unhimself-like his little announcement really was. Mommy Duck won't see you for a while, he felt like saying. You'll have to paddle on alone. The elevator doors closed on the thought.

The McDaniel Center was run by Jeremy Baxter, a man he hated, and he had to stand the psychiatrist's assessing look as he went through the ritual of signing in, talking about the whys, his new resolve, making it all up, while he could practically hear the other man's mind chanting _tro-hu-ble with the co-ps_. Looking at the list of replacement therapies they offered and which he, being a doctor, might choose in consultation with them. Vigabatrin? – he did realize that was an anticonvulsant, didn't he, Dr. House. Yes, some studies showed it curbed addiction, no, they weren't up for experiments. Well maybe they should try something new sometime – not everyone's will was as hard-tempered as their attendants' steel-tipped boots. So, buprinorphine. Yes, they might as well tell him to take two aspirin and call them in the morning. A smile and a shrug.

Then the real check-in, peeling off the layers of his privacy, as he moved deeper in, from reception to rec to the tiny room he would share with someone hopefully worse off than he was, because it would make the guy leave him alone. Becoming entombed.

Another first session, with the therapist assigned to him, who unquestionably was not going to talk hockey with him every day, poking around in his brain, then Wilson stood before him in the rec room, looking like he might slap himself to wake himself up. More faces, Cuddy looking simply relieved, then his babies again, all cooing-quacking lost without him. He tried to concentrate on the case they brought. Alone again, he looked up and Dani stood there.

It was as though he woke up, reality rushing back in. The way her hair curled, the tip of her nose still red from the cold. How he loved that. The rec room rushed in, shiny and yet shabby with the chrome smell of despair. The immensity of what he'd just done.

He'd pulled a table to the window and sat on it (it was going to be his spot, he could tell) and she sat across from him cross-legged. She didn't have much time, had to get to work, because it had been late when she called Wilson and found out. No accusation in her voice.

"I didn't know whether to come," she told him. "Whether you wanted me here."

"Dani, this is going to get ugly." He saw her almost smile. "Go ahead and say it. You've gotten used to ugly in the past year."

"I've gotten used to feeling things I never felt before." Her finger stroked his bare foot stretched out on the table. Miles between them to be bridged. "I just have to know if it will help or hurt if I come see you."

"It will help." Oh god, please come see me.

She told him more about Tritter, things he felt pretty sure she'd tried to tell him the night before and which he had been too busy making an ass of himself to pay attention to. He didn't want to think about that, the things he'd yelled at her. He listened to her story about the man in the baseball cap. Alarm bells went off in his head.

"Doesn't sound like a cop. If he is, he needs to hit the books on undercover work again. He didn't know how to follow our car without being seen. And a _turquoise_ cap when you're trying to stay inconspicuous – now, that says world-class bumbler if anything does."

"He must be Internal Affairs, Greg. He says Tritter's done something bad."

"Damn tootin'."

"I'm pretty sure he means before you came along. If he's not Internal Affairs, what is he?"

"Who knows what Tritter's messed up in?" The irony of it made him want to throw his cane across the room. It was all more complicated than he'd thought – maybe even dangerous – and he'd locked himself up in a little set of rooms, pledged not to leave for weeks, while she faced god-knew-what out there alone.

"I'm going to see Tritter again," she told him. She had her stubborn face on, the one that said she dreaded his response but wasn't going to back down. "You going into rehab changes everything and I have to make him see that." At his expression she added: "Not to – sleep with him. He likes my company. I'm going to talk him around." _So wonderfully naive_.

"Just be careful." He had to make her hear the alarm bells. "Look, if…something happens, some situation comes up – you do what Tritter tells you to." He ignored her stare. "I may hate him, but I assume he's good at what he does. He can protect you physically." She nodded.

Then she was leaving. He took her hand and pulled her back. "There's one more thing." He didn't know how to start. "You're the fourth person to ever – know, Dani." She knew instantly what he meant. "I've never told anyone about my childhood. Not Wilson, not even Stacy, and it has to stay that way." She hugged him. "Please."

"Black hole," she whispered in his ear. It was their half-serious code for things he'd told her that had to stay secret, usually concerning matters that would get his medical license revoked.

When she was gone, he took out his cell phone, called the main Princeton police department and asked for Internal Affairs. No, a voice told him, they would certainly not divulge any information on the phone as to whether a particular officer was under investigation. A woman's voice, which softened when he turned on the charm. Michael Tritter? She couldn't hide the hint of surprise. Did he want to report an irregularity? Would he like to leave his name? He hung up.

So Turquoise-Cap likely had nothing to do with the department. He stared down through the window onto the back parking lot.

_Be careful_.

--

Then the days stretched before him, nauseating group sessions and nauseating time alone. Dani came as often as she could, numb sympathy replacing the shock, he knew, once she saw how bad real detox was. On the third visit she found him in bed in the middle of the day, in his shorts and unwashed, and he caught the look of dismay she quickly hid. He needed a spy. He had always taken care to keep a few nurses in reserve whom he had never been mean to, ones who would do him favors when he needed them – rescheduling an operation or just covering for him when he left clinic duty early (they formed a microcosm of dissent among the other nurses when he overheard conversations: "I don't know what you're all talking about – he's so nice"). He tapped one of them now, a twenty-something in reception, whose smiles had always been warmer than their little pleasantries called for, and who promised to call him back on his cell phone whenever she saw Dani come in. It gave him time, while she rode up in the elevator, to get ready for her: throw on clothes that were clothes by definition and not underwear (sixty seconds), comb his hair and brush his teeth (twenty seconds each), hobble – gasping and pushing aside anyone who got in his way – to his table by the window, where he would lounge as though he'd been there for hours, all timed to the moment she stood before him, as she did now, and smiled.

"You look like you're feeling better."

"It's washing out of the system." Repressing the shakes was killing him.

They talked about nothing when she visited. He'd told her about his call to Internal Affairs; she'd told him Tritter refused to accept that the rehab meant anything, that she'd responded by telling the bastard they didn't need any more 'talks', though he'd called her twice since. The subject of Tritter required strength he didn't have. And so they talked about intrigues in her dance troupe, who was sleeping with who, things the ducklings had said.

She leaned her head on the window frame (she had shadows under her own eyes, he realized, the strain of worry showing). "You have a grand view of the back parking lot."

"I watch the contents of the dumpsters wax and wane. Actually it gets interesting. 'Rear window' a la Hitchcock. I'm getting to see who smooches who before getting in separate cars and driving home to separate spouses. And, boy, if anyone dumps a body in one of those dumpsters, I'll be the first to know." He was trying to light a cigarette, but the lighter had grown to ten times its normal size or his fingers had shrunk. The lighter clattered to the table and when he twisted for it, he knocked the overflowing ashtray to the floor. Others in the room turned.

The shadows under her eyes deepened. "Greg."

"I'm having a – bad hand day." She saw the shakes then; he couldn't hold them back.

He explained to her that it wasn't going as well as she thought. "The nights are bad." She was rubbing his hands, massaging them, as though that would help. "I wish so much you could be here then." He sounded pathetic even to himself. He hadn't wanted her to know that truth, how bad it was when she left each day.

She looked straight at him. "Let's go to your room."

She was worried about his roommate coming in. Not a problem, he assured her, rich white kid who stayed at the computer in the media room all day, a kind of rasta geek with a booze problem and parents paying a fortune in rehab to prove their son hadn't inherited their weak-character genes. Locks? Not on these doors, babe. He propped a chair under the handle for her; wouldn't keep out the big guys, he said, and when he turned she was already undressing. Always a rush, the way she pulled her top over her head in one smooth motion and there they were, nipples standing out half an inch, so dark against the pale skin. The way she lifted his shirt to kiss his chest and drew his swelling cock out of his loose pants. The way she took it inside her, already wet. The bed might as well have been an army cot, as shabby as the rest of the place. It creaked alarmingly. She held her hand over his mouth again and he wanted to tease her, to say Prude, but he could only gasp Oh god oh jesus why was it always so strong with her when he came, as though his groin could never hold it. He came in his fingertips and in the top of his head. All the pain went the away, the despairing surroundings, everything except her eyes and lips there below him.

Afterward he leaned against the wall behind the bed and watched her dress. There was something he had been putting off telling her.

"I didn't mean what I said."

She turned. He saw she knew what he was referring to, as though she really did read his mind. It had lain between them, it lay between them there now on the bed: the fact that he'd made her cry so hard she'd passed out.

"Yes you did," she replied. "People always say what they really think when they lose control."

"No." Barely a whisper.

She tried to smile. "I'm not smart, Greg." He was shaking his head. "Dancing doesn't call for a lot of brains. Actually that's – one good thing about your leg." The little look she gave him was frightening. His words had hurt her worse than he thought, he realized. "It makes us equals – you're the intellectual one, and I'm - the physical one. Superior to you in that way at least, because you're a cripple." She'd never used the word before. It sounded like it hurt her mouth. It occurred to him what she was trying to do. "Not that I like the leg. I _hate_ it. It's ugly as hell. I _hate_ having to wait for you on stairs, I hate the way people look at us when we walk in a place." (Yes, that was what she was doing.) "The time we got caught in that downpour, I thought hell I'm going to get soaked just because of him, and then you told me to run on ahead for cover and when I did, I had to feel bad about that too." Another half-glance his way. "Sometimes I wish you had let them cut it off back then. At least with a prosthesis you could dance with me."

What she was doing was trying to hurt him, as deeply as he had hurt her. The attempt was pitiful and endearing. She was so bad at it she couldn't even look him in the eyes while she said it. It made him want to cry.

She was standing. "I have a costuming appointment in the morning. I'll be by in the afternoon. Okay?" He nodded. She kissed him again, not looking at him, and then she was gone.

--

"He says I remind him of his ex-wife."

"I'd like to see that wife – as if Tritter could ever have rated anything like you."

She leaned back against the metal cabinet they'd drawn to the foot of the bed to block the view, geek roommate having almost walked in on them the day before. She'd put her sweater back on and it formed a cave around her hips. He could look straight up it, to where her thighs rested slightly apart, the bush of her hair still glistening with their fluids. He felt like he could have another go.

"Not sure what exactly reminds him," Dani mused. She shifted her legs and he felt warm. "She didn't sound like me from the description – more like a blond bitch."

"But he's getting mushy-sentimental with you. Ex-wife reminiscing is a good sign. I think." He still wasn't sure how he felt about Dani continuing her quicksand game with the cop. They'd been out again twice, she'd told him. She thought Tritter might be opening up to the idea of coming to see him in rehab. Right, he'd answered, just as soon as he'd finished arranging the evidence hearing.

"I have to go." She stood and pulled her panties on. In the harsh light she seemed thin and he wondered if she'd lost a little weight. He'd noticed the fingerprint-size bruises on her upper arms she often got from the male dancers' holds. She bruised so easily that he'd done it himself sometimes, had lain beside her after sex and noted with shame the prints just starting to darken from where his own hands had clutched her in the flush of orgasm. And yet they seemed so many now. As though she were bruising more easily, her body showing the toll that circumstances were taking on her mind. He felt bile in his throat from the trap he was in, his little set of rooms.

"You're being careful, aren't you?" he asked. She glanced at him. "Have you seen Turquoise Cap again?"

"Last night. He was watching from down the street when I left the restaurant with Tritter. He didn't have the cap on. Maybe he's realized it makes him stand out." She paused. "I'm starting to think you're right, Greg, that he's not a cop. He seemed so – young when I talked to him. Hard, but…unprofessional. If he didn't look so ragged, he could just be some blond kid in college somewhere…" Her voice trailed off. She was staring away, with a far-off frown. "Oh my god."

"What?"

"I thought he was familiar the first time I saw him." She turned to him. "Oh god, Greg. I just realized where I've seen Turquoise Cap before."

--

Rasta geek was happy to help. Hacking into police records took a single call to a friend for a list of codes and five minutes with the computer in the media room. Roommates could be helpful after all, he thought. When Rasta – Josh in the real world - was finished they stared over his shoulder at the mug shot on the screen.

"The resemblance is so obvious once you know," Dani muttered.

"So this is – like – the guy you're in rehab about?" Josh asked.

"No," he told him. "That would be his dad. This –" he indicated the mug shot, its blond baby-round face staring terrified into the camera – "is the son the bastard sent to prison for drug dealing."

"Oh cool." Josh called up more screens. Blake Tritter, arrests since the age of sixteen, always minor possession, until the day he was caught in college being generous – for a small fee – with his personal supply of ecstasy and GHB.

Dani's hand on his arm tightened. "Tritter _pursued_ the drug-dealing charge, Greg. His name is on all the reports."

The taste in his mouth was worse than bile. Dull leaden hate.

"Looks like he pushed for the five-year sentence too," Josh added. "Little thing like this – just sharing around the love – might get you six months, but look at this court transcript." They all read in silence how Detective Michael Tritter had introduced evidence that one of the college students being sold the drugs was only seventeen. "Delivery to a minor. Made the sentence go up." Rasta Josh seemed to know a lot about it.

"Why would he do that to his own son?" she whispered.

He flashed on an image of the kid as a teenager, fights with cop-dad, for whom snorting toking Blakey represented nothing but failure. Tritter would have been sick of the whole thing or he might have had some idea of turning his son's life around by consigning him to hell for five years. The son's bitterness had to be tremendous.

Josh was pointing to a date. "He just got out two months ago."

In which time he had caught up with daddy. A daddy who was too caught up in the pretty woman at his side the last few days to notice he was being watched.

He turned to Dani. "Don't see Tritter again," he commanded.

She was still staring at the screen. "I have to," she muttered. "He said he might come here with me tomorrow to talk to you."

"Dani, listen to me." She finally looked at him. "We're dealing with two fucked-up people here. The daddy's so play-it-straight he could have the Empire State Building up his ass and never notice. Does this to his kid and thinks he's the good guy. Which is so divorced from reality it borders on deranged. And the son – who knows how twisted his head got in prison? I need to know you're staying out of their way."

"You're the one who might go to prison, Greg. If I can get him to drop the charges –"

"Tritter's not going to drop the charges against me! For _one reason_." Josh and Dani were both staring at him. "Because I'm his son."

"_What?_"

"I'm his ersatz Blake Tritter, dammit. There's a reason he latched onto my drug problem just about the time he knows his son is getting out of jail. A son that doesn't contact him, so he figures whatever he was trying to do failed. I'm Tritter's new project. He wouldn't back down on this thing even if you slept with him, Dani."

Josh's eyes were wide. "So cool," he muttered.

"Oh, shut up. And thanks for your help. Now get that off the screen before someone comes in."

She wouldn't listen to reason, though he argued for ten more minutes. At the door she turned. "I can take care of myself, Greg."

"No you can't."

His blunt assertion didn't bother her. She gave him her almost-smile. "I've survived you for a year."

_Not the same thing_. He was shaking again and she held his hands in hers. "I can't be your hero," he murmured. "If anything happened to you…"

"You're doing something heroic right now." She indicated the rehab center. "I'll call you in the morning. Okay?"

--

Fog curled along the streets the next day, wisps of white blanketing the cars that pulled in and out of the back parking lot. He could feel the chill in his bones, as though the fog had seeped under the door of the center, though he only sat gazing out at it all day from his high window. Dani had called to say she was bringing Tritter by to talk to him, that the cop had finally agreed it might change things. That she hadn't mentioned to him what they'd discovered. He could still hear her admonishment to keep his uncivil tongue in his head when they got there. Which would be hard. If the jackass acted possessive with her in any way – put his hand on her arm or called her Danielle in that gummy voice - he knew he wouldn't be able to contain himself.

He gazed back down at the strands of fog growing dark. It was six. She'd promised they would be there by five.

A car pulled in to the lot and he tensed. Dani and Tritter. He watched them get out and head toward the door below him. The back door provided a quicker way up to the rehab center and Dani had started to use it, though it took her past ER, which she hated, she said, with its rows of traumatized or dull-eyed patients waiting their turn. He bent closer to the window to watch the two of them.

From the fog behind them a figure stepped from another car and slipped after them. A man in a turquoise baseball cap, moving like an animal, closing the distance between them fast though they hadn't noticed him, until all three vanished from view almost at the same time below the protruding arch of the door.

For a second he couldn't move. Then he was off the table. He had his cane and was lunging through reception, the too-young male nurse on duty shouting, "Dr House, if you've decided to leave rehab, you have to sign –" but he only tossed back a shouted curse about signing the guy's ass, then he was at the elevator, the door blessedly just closing, and he forced himself through. The elderly couple inside shrank against the far wall while he pushed wildly at the ground-floor button and yelled, "Come on!" His cell phone rang.

It was his spy nurse. "Dr. House, there's something going on over in ER! I can see that cop you told me to watch out for and everyone's shouting –" She blathered something senseless. He wanted to scream at her that she was a trained nurse, that she ought to be able to give precise information, but his throat wouldn't work. "I can't see anything –"

Then the door opened on the bottom floor.

A crowd stood with their backs to him. Beyond them a man's voice shouted, harsh, almost girlish. He shoved through.

Blake Tritter held Dani pinned to him, at her throat a blade. A scalpel, he saw, he must have picked it up in an empty ER room as he slinked in behind them. His thoughts felt sluggish. His heart beat too fast. Along the wall patients crouched out of the line of fire of two security guards who held guns pointed at Dani's assailant, afraid to shoot because they might hit the victim. Dani's eyes were huge. He could see her gasping breaths, her neck taut against the scalpel.

"_You love her, don't you!_" Blake Tritter's scream sounded unnatural, as though he were coughing up trash. _Yes I do oh god please_. He realized the guy was talking to his father. "She _means_ something to you, doesn't she? You wanna _lose_ her? _Will that hurt_?"

He saw Tritter then. The detective had collapsed into a waiting-room chair at the edge of the crowd. His eyes gazed at his raving son without seeing him. The guy had just crumpled at the shock, as rotting-soft on the inside as the marshmallow he looked like on the outside. So much for the cop skills that he'd told Dani would protect her. Which left the two security bozos, leveling their guns at her assailant and her. One moved closer.

"No!" He lunged from the crowd. "Put the damn guns down!"

Blake Tritter spun to stare, twisting Dani with him. The blade came closer to her throat. Her eyes widened when she saw him.

"She doesn't mean anything to your dad," he shouted, then realized he could speak in a normal tone, that the room around him was silent, holding its breath. "He hardly knows her. It won't mean anything if you hurt her, Blake." _If you kill her_. He took two steps and the guy tensed, his eyes going to his cane. He let it clatter to the floor and lurched forward another step. "It would be useless."

Confusion lay in Blake's face at this stranger who knew his name, who risked approaching him, then he was yelling at him, at his father and the crowd. "Useless? You wanna know what _useless_ is? It's going to prison for _nothing_!" He turned to his father now. "I begged you not to send me to that _pit_ – do you remember me saying that? I _begged_!" He seemed about to cry. "You didn't care. They raped me so bad in there I almost bled to death. I had to be put in the infirmary. It was the only way to keep 'em _off_ me!" His hand tightened on the scalpel. "You think that was a useless five years? Well, I want blood back now. There has to be _blood_! _Do you hear me?_"

"You're in the ER." The kid's head jerked back to him. "Plenty of blood here. All fresh and siphoned off into little bags." He was babbling; he could hear his dad saying, Being the joker will only get you so far. "I could go get you some."

It was the wrong tack. Blake Tritter's face turned pale with rage. "Oh, no," he murmured. His voice was calm, entirely insane. His hand tightened. "There has to be blood."

"_No_." Think of something. He tried not to look at Dani - he would lose it if he did - but she was telling him something with her eyes, to stop horsing around maybe - no, that she was planning to do something.

She stuck her thumb in her mouth.

_Going infantile_, his first thought, then he realized she was remembering the night a week ago. She was trying to faint, puffing out her cheeks. If she slipped down in a real faint, not faked, her attacker might not be able to hold her, exposing him to the guns. The thumb trick, tried by children everywhere, who were always shocked when it worked. What fainters didn't know was that they were not out for minutes as they assumed, more like five seconds, not enough time to even slump to the floor, just going weak-kneed like she did now. Blake felt her slide and locked his grip, and she was back.

"Don't try that again!" He brought the blade to her skin and a drop of red appeared.

_Angled chisel blade, reusable_. Right there on her carotid triangle. His eyes were playing tricks on him. The scalpel had grown. As though he looked through a lens the world had shrunk to nothing except the tip of steel nestled there in that bead of red. Impossibly large because he was feet away so why did he think he could see the pulse of her blood there too, as though he bent near to kiss it –

- he would wish the blade away he would stop time, anything –

He limped closer, ignoring Blake's warning hiss, the growing stunned silence in the room, until he was close enough to reach out his hand, slowly. "I'm going to take it," he said. _Don't look at Dani_. His fingertips closed on the back of the blade and Blake yelled, "No!" He drew his hand back. He could smell the street stink from him.

"Blake, it's him you want to do this to." He gestured at Tritter, who looked like a blanched vegetable now. There was nothing there in the cop's face anymore. He'd seen more expression on corpses.

"_No!_" Blake screamed. "Blood! I want him to see it!"

Blood. That was it, an answer. He held up his hand, palm open in a traffic-stopping gesture. Simple enough. No shakes. The kid understood. His eyes were wild with disbelief. He had to nod _Go on_. Then the scalpel came up and slashed his palm from top to bottom. The pain lanced through his head. Dani's body flinched as though the guy'd done it to her, her eyes wide on the cut he couldn't see. He felt his warm blood dribble down his wrist.

"Not enough?" He extended his other hand.

Her wordless breaths in and out were saying _please no_. Blake lifted the scalpel again and sliced his other palm, deeper this time, a burn of carbon-steel through the volar, flexor. It caught at his throat and made him gasp. When he made a fist blood seeped through the back of his fingers, he could probably write the hand off but what the hell, at least the kid's hand with the blade was away from her neck, pointed down at the floor for a second. They might shoot now, he wouldn't care about the kid – or he would because the guy still held Dani pressed to him, and the security guards, he knew, had their jobs because they were no good at police work, the kind who shot themselves in the foot when they went for a leak. He prayed they would not try for a shot now.

Then the scalpel thudded to the floor. Blake Tritter was looking at his father. At useless cop, useless dad, who didn't need to be broken by anything his son did because he was already broken on the inside and always had been. Blake understood it, he saw. The kid slumped, released Dani and the guards moved in, pushing him to the floor.

She was in his arms. She was crying over his hands. Cameron appeared out of nowhere (had the whole hospital come for the thrill?), wearing the alarmed look you learn in med school a doctor should never show, and called for bandages. The cuts were bad (she was trying to hold him and not hold him, afraid of getting in Cameron's way, she was whiter looking at his wounds than she'd been with a scalpel at her neck). With the right suture the hands would be fine, he was telling someone. He was down on his knees; he didn't know when that had happened. Behind him a guard shouted at Blake Tritter – "You're going to jail for this!" – and the kid broke into loud sobs, screaming that he couldn't go back to that place. Begging. He didn't want to look. It reminded him too much of something.

Then different shouts rose. People were ducking. He spun, then threw himself over Dani.

Blake Tritter held a gun. Because the dumbass guard had handcuffed him in _front_ – no, police work definitely not your thing, idiot – the kid had managed to snatch the guy's gun from his holster. He waved the gun - more screams from the crowd – then twisted it in spite of the cuffs, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

She was pressing her face to his chest, screaming that he'd been shot, but he told her _No_. He told her not to look. She did anyway. The doctors running to the body were only pro forma, he knew. "Is he still alive?" she moaned. Not with that much brain matter on the floor, he wanted to say.

Beyond the hub gathered at the body he could see Mike Tritter. The man had sagged to the floor in a twisted heap. Where there had been nothing in his expression before, just the Cop Without a Face, there was everything now, all the things you never wanted to encounter on a human face. He'd seen a lot of despair, but none so bad that it sickened him the way Tritter's face did. He turned away and held her close.

--

She kept seeing it.

They stitched up his hands and she saw again the way the blood had gushed toward her from his upraised palms, so sudden and sure of itself. A policeman questioned them and she saw again how Tritter had stared, his eyes like running sores, at his dead son's body. Flashes, like heat lightning, behind her sight, while they accompanied the cop to the station to sign witness reports, and listened to a man with a sad voice, Tritter's partner, she thought someone said, telling them the investigation against Greg would probably be dropped without Tritter's impetus behind it. Tritter, who would be leaving work for a rest. Then home, not even stopping to pick up Greg's things from rehab. They stood in the living room and another flash made her jerk, the feel of cold steel on her neck. She fingered the bandage there, then the thicker bandages on his hands, and he wrapped her in his arms, locked his arms around her so tightly she could hardly breathe, but she wanted to stay that way.

"I keep seeing it," she told him.

"It will be that way for a while," he whispered.

"I keep hearing the things he said. The way he called prison a pit." She felt sick. "I think that's probably the one thing that had gotten to Tritter back when he sent him to prison – he knew what kind of pit he was dropping his son into."

"But he did it anyway." Greg's face was hard. He seemed to have aged. "A snake pit. His dad locked him up in a little room with snakes. Might as well have turned the key himself." For a moment he seemed reminded of something. "A little room. With pythons worse than any real python could ever be." He suddenly shook himself, then he was muttering and crossing to the phone. "What's Kerstin's number?" he asked.

"What? Greg, it's almost midnight."

"Your sister's number, dammit." She told him and watched him punch in the number. His hands were shaking again. "Kerstin, this is Greg. Put Kevin on the phone…well, wake him up."

Then he was talking to the little voice she could barely hear from where she stood, its replies sleepy-confused, almost frightened. He was apologizing.

"…and I couldn't have known you were that scared of snakes, you see that, don't you?" A hesitant reply from the voice on the phone. "I would _never_ have done that if I'd known you had a phobia. For all I knew you might have enjoyed it, you might have walked out of there with the thing wrapped around your shoulders." Another question from the phone. "I just want to know that you understand that, Kevin." With dismay she saw that he had tears in his eyes. From Kevin's inaudible reply she could tell her nephew was still confused. She wished she could take the phone from Greg and just explain – Look, its simple, Kevin, he needs to know he's not a sadistic bastard like his own dad – but he held the phone pressed hard to his ear, intent on Kevin's answer. His eyes were closed. "I want to know you forgive me," he said.

She remembered that Kerstin and Dan knew nothing about the snake incident. She would have to call Kerstin back the next day and explain why a grown man was calling a boy at midnight to apologize for scaring him with some snake. But it didn't matter. Kevin's answer, which she couldn't hear, seemed to satisfy him. He looked younger again, the tension around his eyes ebbing. She eased the phone from him and told Kevin to go back to bed, then hung up.

"He never thought badly of you for that," she told him.

"The pythons are everywhere, aren't they?" He gazed down at his bandaged hands. "In me. In everyone."

Yes, she wanted to answer. We fight it and it comes back and we fight it again. It's what people do.

It was what they would do together, always.

...

End of Chapter 7

Although there's more to tell in Greg and Dani's story, I don't know at all when I'll be able to return to it, so I'm calling this The End For Now. Future stories with Dani will just have to be separate, I guess. Thanks to everyone for reading!


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